I've observed a HTTP 1.1 Server implementation, which terminates a client connection as soon as it detects a client-side connection shutdown of its outgoing channel (or rather, either before or after sending a proper http response). Is this a conforming HTTP 1.1 implementation?
RFC 2616 Section 8.1.4 seems to suggest this is to be the proper behaviour:
When a client or server wishes to time-out it SHOULD issue a graceful
close on the transport connection. Clients and servers SHOULD both
constantly watch for the other side of the transport close, and
respond to it as appropriate.
...
Servers SHOULD NOT close a connection in the middle of transmitting a response, unless a network or client failure is suspected.
Am I interpreting it right? Is there a more explicit reference about half-closed connection handling in the context of HTTP 1.1?
As far as i know, thats is all we need to know about Half-closed connections.
The server will only close the connection if it detects that the client closed it (it can ben when the server is about to write to the socket) or at the end of the request, if it does not support connection: keep-alive.
The client can disconnect any time, but it should tell the server why is it disconnecting (time_out, request cancel). But it is not very used by those who write sockets components. They just close the socket when they need to force a time_out.
But the client implementation is not the problem. You should worry about server implementation since suffer a lot with those unexpected disconnects.
EDIT
Maybe those links can help you.
Transmission Control Protocol - Functional Specification
TRANSMISSION CONTROL PROTOCOL
Related
I need to operate with a SOAP service from Erlang. SOAP implementation is not a subject, I have a problem with HTTP requests at a client side.
I use IBrowse as a HTTP client. This SOAP service uses a specific authorization mechanism, which relates an opened session to a client connection (socket). So, the client should use only one persistent connection to server (socket), and if it try to send a request via another socket (e.g., connection from pool) - authorization will fail.
I use IBrowse in this way:
Spawn connection process to server (ibrowse:spawn_worker_process/1)
Send request to server via spawned process with {max_sessions, 1} and {max_pipeline_size, 0}.
If I understand the docs right, this should use one socket for server connection with disabled pipelining, also, I use Connection: Keep-Alive header and HTTP version explicitly set to 1.0. But my connection is always closed after the response is received.
How can I use IBrowse (or another http-client) the way I described above?
I think you could that with hackney by reusing a connection.
Also gun is quite nice http client, easy to use, keeping connection, but with little less connection control.
I just went through the specification of http 1.1 at http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html and came across a section about connections http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec8.html#sec8 that says
" A significant difference between HTTP/1.1 and earlier versions of HTTP is that persistent connections are the default behavior of any HTTP connection. That is, unless otherwise indicated, the client SHOULD assume that the server will maintain a persistent connection, even after error responses from the server.
Persistent connections provide a mechanism by which a client and a server can signal the close of a TCP connection. This signaling takes place using the Connection header field (section 14.10). Once a close has been signaled, the client MUST NOT send any more requests on that connection. "
Then I also went through a section on http state management at https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2965 that says in its section 2 that
"Currently, HTTP servers respond to each client request without relating that request to previous or subsequent requests;"
A section about the need to have persistent connections in the RFC 2616 also said that prior to persistent connections every time a client wished to fetch a url it had to establish a new TCP connection for each and every new request.
Now my question is, if we have persistent connections in http/1.1 then as mentioned above a client does not need to make a new connection for every new request. It can send multiple requests over the same connection. So if the server knows that every subsequent request is coming over the same connection, would it not be obvious that the request is from the same client? And hence would this just not suffice to maintain the state and would this just nit be enough for the server to understand that the request was from the same client ? In this case then why is a separate state management mechanism required at all ?
Basically, yes, it would make sense, but HTTP persistent connections are used to eliminate administrative TCP/IP overhead of connection handling (e.g. connect/disconnect/reconnect, etc.). It is not meant to say anything about the state of the data moving across the connection, which is what you're talking about.
No. For instance, there might an intermediate (such as a proxy or a reverse proxy) in the request path that aggregates requests from multiple TCP connections.
See http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-httpbis-p1-messaging-21.html#intermediaries.
I am working on linux.
I have a HTTP client which requests some data from the HTTP server. The HTTP client is written in C and HTTP server is written in perl.
I want to simulate TCP re-transmission timeouts at the client end.
I assume that closing the socket gracefully would not result in client to re-transmit the requests.
So I tried the following scenario:
Exit the Server as soon as it gets the HTTP GET request. However, I noticed that once the application exits, the socket is still closed gracefully. I see that the server initiates FIN.ACK messages towards the client even though the application has not called "close" on the socket. I have noticed this behaviour on a simple TCP server and client written in C program as well.
Server does not send any response to the client's GET request. In this case I notice that there is still FIN, ACK sent by the server.
Seems that in these cases the OS (linux) takes care of closing the socket with the peer.
Is there any way to suppress this behaviour (using ioctl or setsockopt options) or any other way to simulate the TCP re-transmission timeouts.
You could try setting firewall rules that block the packets going from the server to the client, which would cause the client to re-transmit the quests. On Linux, this would probably be done using iptables, but different distributions have different methods of controlling it.
This issue was previously discussed here
In http transaction for request and response which scenario is occurred ?
client (web browser) open connection and send it's request and connection open (keep alive) until server accept and answer then close connection ?
client (web browser) open connection and send it's request then connection is closed and server accept and answer and reconnect and send response ?
in http1.0 and http1.1 this scenario is different ?
A server can't directly reconnect to a client. Hence, your scenario #2 is unlikely.
In other words, in the WEB world, "transactions" between a Client Browser and a WEB Server is always "Client Browser Initiated".
Of course, if we are talking about server-to-server communication over HTTP, it is a different story: you can make up your own rules here, provided you control at least one server ;-)
As for the difference between HTTP 1.0 and HTTTP 1.1, I don't know enough.
In both 1.0 and 1,1 connection is kept open until response is sent. Keep alive refers to what happens afterwards.
In HTTP 1.0 server closes the connection after sending the response. Unless client sends and server understands keep-alive header (which was not a part of HTTP 1.0 standard)
In HTTP 1.1 connection is kept open after the response unless client sends Connection: close header.
Details
The scenario is:
The client (browser) opens a connection to the web server and sends HTTP request
The server receives the request and sends back the response to the client (browser)
If keep alive is enabled, the connection will not be closed until the keep alive timeout expires. The idea of keep alive is to use the same TCP connect to send/receive multiple requests/responses.
Persistent connection / Keep alive was officially introduced in the HTTP 1.1 specification. keep-alive was not officially documented in the specification of HTTP 1.0, however, some implementation of HTTP 1.0 supported keep alive connections.
regarding scenario 2: The server never initiate connections with browsers, the browser initiate connections with the server and the server uses the same connection to send back responses.
From this article on Wikipedia:
Keepalive messages were not officially
supported in HTTP 1.0. In HTTP 1.1 all
connections are considered persistent,
unless declared otherwise.
Does this mean that using this
mechanism I can actually simulate a
TCP socket connection?
Using this can I make a Server
"push" data to a client?
Are all HTTP connections, even the
one I am using to connect to Stack
Overflow "HTTP persistent"?
Does the COMET technology of
server push use this mechanism of
HTTP persistent connection to push
data to clients?
Does this mean that using this mechanism I can actually simulate a
TCP socket connection?
Not really, sockets have MANY more features and flexibility.
Using this can I make a Server "push" data to a client?
Not directly, it's still a request/response protocol; the persistent connection just means the client can use the same underlying socket to send multiple requests and receive the respective responses.
Are all HTTP connections, even the one I am using to connect to Stack
Overflow "HTTP persistent"?
Unless your browser (or a peculiar server) says otherwise, yes.
Does the COMET technology of server push use this mechanism of HTTP
persistent connection to push data to
clients?
Kinda (for streaming, at least), but with a lot of whipped cream on top. There are other Comet implementation approaches, such as hidden iframes and AJAX long polling, that may not require persistent connections (which give some firewalls &c the fits anyway;-).
Actually, the HTTP server can "push" data to a connected http client without the client requesting it. See "HTTP server push" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_technology. However it does seem to be commonly implemented.