Shouldn’t make any difference. Websockets automatically disconnect without activity after 1 minute, so the 55 seconds auto ping will keep the sockets open even if nothing is being sent. Generally this is a good thing because you may want to keep the socket open for several minutes but only occasionally make REQs.

Malicious bot traffic will generally be sending lots of REQs (assuming they are wasting resources) not just connecting/disconnecting needlessly (although this happens with poorly made crawlers). Best way to address that is with a firewall in front of/apart of your proxy but you’ll have to see what kind of malicious traffic you get and then go from there!