title: WebSocket data consumption
body: <p>I'm currently studying for a project involving a web-server and some raspberrys.
  The challenge would basically be to watch raspberry &quot;status&quot; on a web interface.</p>
  <p>Raspberrys are connected to the Internet through a GSM connection (mostly 3G).
  I'm developping using Node.js on both the clients and the server, and I'd like to use websockets through socket.io in order to watch the raspberry connection status (actually, this is more like watching the raspberry capability to upload data through my application), dealing with &quot;connected&quot; and &quot;disconnected&quot; events.</p>
  <p>Would an always-alive websocket connection be reliable for such a use-case?
  Are websocket designed-to (or reliable-for) staying opened?
  Since this is a hard-testable situation, does anyone know a data-consumption estimate for an always-alive websocket?
  If I'm going in a wrong way, does anyone ever worked on such a use-case via another reliable way?</p>