[Update & Thanks] Losing my mind over Apple Push Notification delays that appear network-related.

Original post: https://old.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/a40dsl/losing_my_mind_over_apple_push_notification/

I wanted to say thanks for everyone who reached out, and provide some feedback for those who might see this problem again. I was a little overwhelmed with the number of people who were perfectly willing to dig up documentation/old support tickets/detailed suggestions for me.

I spent a bunch of hours on the phone with Meraki in troubleshooting this. The support technician eventually informed me that the flow table in the firewall is set to drop inactive flows after 5 minutes of inactivity, and cannot be modified. This is breaking the long-lived APNs socket without notifying the phone, so the phone was happily waiting for messages it would never receive.

This means that it is very likely anyone with one of these Meraki appliances will experience push notification delays if they are not already receiving notifications at <5 minute intervals. The devices will eventually re-establish a connection, but in my experience, this can take 5-10 minutes.

For reference, the Meraki model is an MX100. I do not know if all Meraki devices are permanently set in this way, but there is no exposure to the flow table and no configuration options for this in the MX100. There is no way to really see what is happening here, from the consumer's standpoint, it just silently drops the connection and only technical support can actually see it happening.

The support technician is forwarding information to the product development team. I was very clear that this is not just a localized customer problem, they need to address the issue of clipping quiet sockets after 5 minutes.

Thanks again for everyone's help. I hope some future redditor/Google traveler finds this and it proves helpful.