Do I need to heartbeat to keep a TCP connection open?

Question

I have two components that that communicate via TCP/IP. Component A acts as a server/listener and Component B is the client. The two should communicate as quickly as possi

Answer 1

Heartbeat isn't a necessity for TCP protocols. It's implementation is there to detect whether the otherside has terminated the connection in the non standard way (i.e not gone through the tear down process).