Chapter 9 High Availability for FortiOS 5.0 : HA and failover protection : HA heartbeat and communication between cluster units : Modifying heartbeat timing
  
Modifying heartbeat timing
In an HA cluster, if a cluster unit CPU becomes very busy, the cluster unit may not be able to send heartbeat packets on time. If heartbeat packets are not sent on time other units in the cluster may think that the cluster unit has failed and the cluster will experience a failover.
A cluster unit CPU may become very busy if the cluster is subject to a syn flood attack, if network traffic is very heavy, or for other similar reasons. You can use the following CLI commands to configure how the cluster times HA heartbeat packets:
config system ha
set hb-interval <interval_integer>
set hb-lost-threshold <threshold_integer>
set helo-holddown <holddown_integer>
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