I have two questions on HTTP Connection close:
If a client sends a HTTP request with Connection: close to HTTP Server, Is it the HTTP Server or client responsibility to send TCP FIN after response is received by client?
If a client sends a bad formatted HTTP request, and server sends a 400 BAD REQUEST, is it best practice to close the connection by server (even though the HTTP request has connection: keep-alive) or is it good practice to keep the connection still active?
Thanks in advance for answering my queries?
When the server receives a 400 Bad Request, it is going to send the response with the keep-alive header because if the client feels like sending another request, then they can use a pre-existing connection (this connection is shut down within a certain amount of time, it has an expiration date). The Keep-Alive Header is more about not saturating the network with TCP connection demands. You basically say "I am going to talk to you, for 2 minutes, whatever you send me, I'll answer you though this connection"
The server is only an object that receives commands from an user. You ask him, he does or not. The TCP FIN is something you send to the server to shut down the connection, but you choose when you don't want to communicate with him anymore. The client transmits the first FIN, and receives an ACK to ensure that the server got it. Then the server launches its own FIN, and waits for the ACK. If everything is okay, you and your server are no longer friends.
Related
Client connects to server and sends request with keep-alive header. Server response also contains keep-alive header.
Now client loses power. Is there any mechanism (like ping) in TCP or HTTP stack, which tells server, that client is not there (other than timeout)?
Now client loses power. Is there any mechanism (like ping) in TCP or HTTP stack, which tells server, that client is not there (other than timeout)?
There is TCP keep alive which is specifically designed to detect lost connectivity.
I'm building a HTTP client(for embedded devices) and I was wondering,
If I receive a HTTP 3xx response, and in the location header I get a hostname different from the one I had in the request. Should I disconnect the TCP connection and reconnect to the new host, or I just need to send a new request with a new host header and keep the old TCP connection alive.
Thank you
It doesn't make sense to reuse the original TCP connection if you're being redirected elsewhere. If my webserver only hosts example.com and I redirect you to elsewhere.net, my webserver will probably not respond to a request for elsewhere.net.
Worse, this also potentially sets you up for a great man-in-the-middle attack if my server redirects you to http://bank.com and you reuse the same TCP connection when sending a request to bank.com. My server can maliciously respond to requests with Host: bank.com, which isn't something you want to happen.
You can't assume the original connection can be reused unless the redirect is to the same same host with the same protocol.
Persistent HTTP connections are a little tricky with the number of client/server combinations. You can avoid the complexity by just wasting time closing and re-establishing each connection:
If you're implementing a HTTP/1.0 client, Connection: keep-alive isn't something you have to implement. Compliant servers should just close the connection after every request if you don't negotiate that you support persistent connections.
If you're implementing a HTTP/1.1 client and don't want to persist the connection, just send Connection: close with your request and a HTTP/1.1 server should close the connection.
HTTP is client - server communication where client always initiates the connection and server responds.
In the client server communication with HTTP 1.1 the following steps takes place:
1. Client sends the request to the server.
2. Server sends the response to the client with the response message and the status code.
My question is how is the data transfer handled in the protocol? I know HTTP is stateless and also it is either everything or nothing mechanism but how do you prove this? How is the handshake between server and client?
For example: When the server sends the response back to the client, what happens if 50% of the data is sent and then there is connection loss...then what will happen in this scenario? Will the client wait for remaining 50% of the message or it will start new transfer where server tries to send 100% of the message again? (In synchronous communication)
HTTP relies on a TCP connection, so in your example if 50% of the data is correctly sent but others packets (yes, you should think in terms of packets) are lost, the data will be sent again following the rules defined in TCP protocol
I noted that fiddler sends "connection:close" header when the client sends a CONNECT request to initiate secure connection along with the "200 connection established" message.
CONNECT request to a forward HTTP proxy over an SSL connection?
As explained in above question, the connection should be kept-alive between the client and the proxy so that the client can subsequently sent the actual request.
Why does fiddler sends the close header? wouldn't the client close the connection because of the header instead?.
Any Connection header in the successful response to the CONNECT request does not make any sense and gets ignored. CONNECT will establish a tunnel, which only ends with the end of the TCP connection. But a Connection header would make sense with an unsuccessful CONNECT, because with close the client would need to start a new TCP connection and with keep-alive (implicit with HTTP/1.1 response) it can reuse it with another request.
Connection: Close means that the connection will be closed after the request completes. Since the request in this scenario only completes when the HTTPS connection is closed, this is exactly the behavior you want for this sort of request.
Arguably, using Connection: keep-alive on a CONNECT request is invalid, since there's no legal way for the connection to be kept-alive after the tunnel is closed.
What exactly is the difference between long polling and http Keep-Alive??
Doesnt http Keep-Alive solve the issue that long-polling solves??
No. They're almost completely unrelated.
HTTP keepalive allows the client to keep a connection open, but idle, to allow it to make future requests a little bit more efficiently. The server cannot send data to a client over a keepalive connection, as no request is active.
Long polling is a mechanism where the server keeps a request (and thus a connection) active, but not sending data, to allow the server to send data to the client when it becomes available -- for instance, when an event occurs.