What are you yapping about? I am not working for IB nor defending them. I am goal oriented and hence look for workarounds and solutions. Bitching does not help. And yes, their API sucks in many areas. But that is all we got for the time being. I gave you a specific way how to minimize the current problems with the gateway re-connect.
I do not see why you are pissed off GRULSTMRNN. I am simply providing free advice on making the Gateway perfect for automation. The point of view of someone that has been doing this for many years, not to mention being the administrator of trading and IB specific forum, with thousands of users, and assisting investors interested in automation, could (or should) be of some value. Especially if it comes for free, and significant waste of time on my part. My general impression is that the programmer of the Gateway does not really understand that there are only machines listening and no humans. This is not a Photoshop or Word interface, it's gateway to channel information and make information exchange possible. There is no point opening blocking windows with buttons to be pushed or similar. Or informing about the account type with pop-ups. There is no one reading those messages with human eyes. Messaging must happen via socket. There are no humans in front of the Gateway. If one does such a thing, it is a clear thing he has no real clue about automation. Nor can be actually using the tool at its full potential. The communication must happen only programmatically. The Gateway must not take initiatives like auto restarting or whatever. It's the client application that, in the case, should be made able to do so and restart seamlessly the gateway, without any prompt or requiring human intervention (secure device, or pressing confirm buttons).
What was your proposed solution again? I must have missed it. I am not pissed off. I am just saying that complaining does not help. I agree with you about everything regarding the gateway and api that it is poorly implemented but that does not get us anywhere. Yes it's frustrating when coding against the api to a degree that it works in a stable fashion only to find out that a breaking change on their end messes things up again but the only way to solve the problem is to find a workaround ourselves. I won't hold my breath for IB to fix it.
Auto restart was probably a feature put in because they have a memory leak and don't know how to fix it. I've noticed that I've needed to give IB more memory (has 8G) these days. Yes the whole login-with-person-using-code is annoying, but you can actually disable that in your IB settings. I haven't done this, but I know it's possible. Then you can use existing IB automation tools to login. No technology is ideal, IB is the incarnation of that philosophy. Everything else will be worse in its own way. IB is like the Win32 API. WhatTheFuckEx. Edit: I have a docker image that I built which runs gateway in it, I use a healthcheck command that checks the last tick that came in. If the last tick came in a minute ago, it forces a restart. It works well enough for me and has caught issues where IB's "auto restart" doesn't "auto restart".