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Update http module to return "408 - Request timeout"- when closing idle TCP connections. #38890
Description
Activity
I think it should be done via framework.
There's currently no way for a framework to implement this, because http does not emit any event when closing an idle connection, nor provide a way to handle it. And it doesn't provide any way to intercept/override this functionality.
Even setting a timeout in the socket doesn't work, and even if it did, you have no way to know if response has already been sent:
server.on('connection', socket => { socket.on('timeout', () => { // This doesn't work. You are not allowed to write to a socket after a timeout. socket.write('408 - Request timeout\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n') console.log(new Date(), 'Socket timeout'); }); });The only alternative would be to override the socket write/close functions. But that would require overriding write function to parse sent data and analyze whether a response is being sent. That would have a significant performance impact.
Reacted by Zach Bjornsonany update?
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Is your feature request related to a problem? YES
Currently, http implementation results in random HTTP errors, as a result of race conditions when closing idle connections.
Node closes idle TCP connections after 5 seconds (configurable using
server.keepAliveTimeout),resulting in a race conditions described at: https://nodejs.org/api/http.html#http_request_reusedsocket
This documentation proposes request might be retried when receiving a
ECONNRESETerror, and that's whatbrowsers do. However, this is not applicable when working with API Gateways, which can't close a downstream
connection (shared by multiple services) when an upstream connection is closed.
Instead, Gateways return a 503 error code when an upstream connection is closed, resulting in a HTTP error.
Additional info here.
The solution would be to configure
server.keepAliveTimeoutto be larger than the client. But Chrome keeps idle connections open for 5 to 6 minutes (according to link, up to 10 minutes). Using such a long timeout in the cloud might not be a good idea.Proposed solution
RFC7231#6.5.7 and Mozilla specify that servers MAY/SHOULD send a
408 – Request Timeoutresponse when closing idle connections, even without a previous request from the server. This would make any further request (if any) to receive a 408 error and would be automatically retried by the browser.Notice that, when using CORS, 408 response MUST include CORS headers (
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *).Currently, there's no simple way to update http module, to return a 408 error when closing idle connections.
I propose updating http module, to allow handling the idle-connection close event. Eg:
Alternative solution
This feature could also be an option, when creating the HTTP server. Eg: