Github user kxepal commented on the pull request:
https://github.com/apache/couchdb/pull/389#issuecomment-194983325
Heartbeats exists to ensure that connection is alive, active and operable,
but not to keep it forever (this is actually should be done with
timeout=infinity). We cannot relay on protocol level keep-alive because it
actually doesn't works as everyone expects and only cause additional hangs
(default may be minute to hours). Application level keep-alive is the only way
to instantly figure out that things went wrong and time to reconnect.
Websockets are effective in unreliable networks because of such approach
(ping/pong).
Otherwise we have quite strange case when you do request `GET
/db/_changes?feed=continuous&heartbeat=1000&timeout=60000` expecting that
timeout will work as usually, but actually it get ignored. That's the first
case. Another one is that helps to workaround COUCHDB-2912 issue.
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