Subject: Persistent connection timeout

From: "Fred Bohle" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Dec 2009 10:59:07 -0500

We support a web server on z/OS mainframes.  In this product, we
support HTTP 1.1 persistent connections.  We routinely return a response
with Connection: Keep-Alive headers.  If the connection remains idle for
a while, we simply close the connection.
 
    Now I am getting a request to change this behavior.  I am being
asked, after the idle timeout,  to send an EXTRA response, with a
Connection: Close header.  This seems odd to me.  Sending an extra
response seems like it introduces an instability:  If the client sends a
request at the same time as we are sending the extra response, the
client could think we processed the request, when we did not.
 
    How do other servers handle the idle connection timeout?  
 
Fred Bohle
Progress Software

---

From: Adrien de Croy <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 05 Dec 2009 08:02:45 +1300

We (WinGate) just close the socket.

Sending another response is incorrect and probably risky for reasons you 
point out.

I've never seen another spurious response on idle timeout.

Regards

Adrien

Fred Bohle wrote:
> support HTTP 1.1 persistent connections.  We routinely return a 
> response with Connection: Keep-Alive headers.  If the connection 
> remains idle for a while, we simply close the connection.
>  
> response seems like it introduces an instability:  If the client sends 
> a request at the same time as we are sending the extra response, the 

-- 
Adrien de Croy - WinGate Proxy Server - http://www.wingate.com