Gemini 3.1 Flash Live Preview WebSocket ping timeout after ~170 seconds (2.5 Live works fine)

Gemini API
1

Hi experts,

I’m seeing a reproducible WebSocket issue with Gemini 3.1 Flash Live Preview.

Environment:

  • Android

  • OkHttp WebSocket

  • gemini-3.1-flash-live-preview

  • v1alpha(and v1beta) GenerativeService.BidiGenerateContent

Client configuration:

.pingInterval(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS)

After about 170 seconds, the connection consistently fails with:

java.net.SocketTimeoutException:
sent ping but didn't receive pong within 10000ms
(after 15 successful ping/pongs)

The issue occurs even when the connection is completely idle (no audio streaming).

Using the exact same:

  • device

  • network

  • client code

  • OkHttp configuration

switching back to Gemini 2.5 Live (gemini-2.5-flash-native-audio-preview-12-2025) completely eliminates the problem.

One interesting observation is that the disconnect timing is highly deterministic:

16:45:31
16:48:23
16:51:14

The interval between failures is consistently around 172 seconds.

Also, before the timeout occurs, the client does not receive any Gemini control messages such as:

goAway
sessionResumptionUpdate
sessionResumption

or any other server message indicating that the session should be refreshed or resumed.

Additional findings:

I disabled OkHttp pingInterval entirely and reproduced the issue again.

Instead of a ping timeout, the server now closes the WebSocket with:

code=1008
reason=“The operation was aborted.”

Has anyone else seen similar ping/pong timeout behavior with Gemini 3.1 Flash Live Preview?

Thanks.

2

I got the same issue when using the Python client. The connection also died after about 3 minutes.