arp cache flushing?

[Justin Clacherty]

Hi,   Should an arp entry be flushed if you are constantly talking to the hardware pointed to in the arp table?   I have a problem where my connection is experiencing a 30-45 second pause every 30 minutes, this pause effectively cuts off an https connection we have running for a specific application.  It seems as though every 30 minutes there is an arp request to the gateway at our ISP which is causing the problem, I assume this is because the arp table is being flushed every 30 minutes.  I have tried to fix the problem (won't know if it is successful until tomorrow) by adding a manual entry to the arp table with 'arp -s'.  I would have thought that if you had talked to the gateway recently, then the arp entry would not be flushed, is this correct?   Regards, Justin.