I am writing a websocket server in Go that broadcasts messages to clients. I use SetWriteDeadline on each send so that the broadcast loop doesn't get stuck.
My question is: how do I interpret an error from SetWriteDeadline? In particular, should I assume that there is something wrong with that particular client and unregister it? Or is it a server-side issue that happened to get triggered on this client?
After researching SetWriteDeadline, I found that the deadline is for putting the message on the TCP stack server-side, not for the client to receive the message. So perhaps a better way to phrase my question is this: is there a separate TCP stack for each websocket client (perhaps this is the thing that has size WriteBufferSize), or is this buffer shared between clients? In the former case it seems like I should unregister the client on a SetWriteDeadline error, but not in the latter case.
Websocket connections are independent of other websocket connections.
Websocket connections have an underlying network connection. These network connections are also independent of each other.
An error returned from SetWriteDeadline indicates a problem with that specific websocket connection or the websocket connection's underlying network connection.
Also note that Gorilla's SetWriteDeadline method never returns an error.
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I am reading the documentation of Alexa Voice Service capabilities and came across the part on managing HTTP2 connection. I don't really understand how this down channel works behind the scenes. Is it using server push? Well, could server push be used to keep a long connection? Or is it just using some tricks to keep the connection alive for a very long time?
As stated on the documentation, the client needs to establish a down channel stream with the server.
Based on what I read here https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7540, From this state diagram:
once the stream sends a HEADER frame, followed by an END STREAM flag, the state will be half-closed(local) on the point of view of the client. So, this is how half-closed state for the device happened, as stated in above image. Correct me that if I am wrong.
For managing the HTTP connection, this is what it says.
Based on my understanding: the client sets a timeout of 60minutes for the GET request. After the request is sent, the server will not send any response. Then the connection will remain open for 60minutes. But once a response is sent from the server, the connection should be closed. Isn't that supposed to happen? Or, is it because when the server sends response through the down channel stream, it did not send an END STREAM flag so the stream will not be closed?
But once a response is sent from the server, the connection should be closed.
HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 use persistent connections, which means that a single connection can be used not just for one request/response, but for several request/response cycles.
Only HTTP/1.0 was closing the connection after the response, and so for HTTP/2 this is not the case, the connection will remain open until either peer decides to explicitly close it.
The recommendations about the idle timeouts are exactly to prevent the client to explicitly close the connection too early when it sees no network traffic, independently from requests or responses.
I'm building a distributed system and I would like asynchronous send and recv from both sides with blocking after high water mark.
PUSH/PULL sockets works great, but I wasn't able to bind a PUSH socket. Meaning I can't have a client-PUSH to server-PULL and a server-PUSH to client-PULL, if the client is behind a firewall, since the server can't connect to the client.
In the book, the following is written, but I can't find an example of it.
"REQ to DEALER: you could in theory do this, but it would break if you added a second REQ because DEALER has no way of sending a reply to the original peer. Thus the REQ socket would get confused, and/or return messages meant for another client." http://zguide.zeromq.org/php:chapter3
I only need a one-to-one connection, so this would in theory work for me.
My question is, what is the best practice to obtain asynchronous send and recv with ZeroMQ without dropping packets?
Most ZeroMQ sockets can both bind (listen on a specific port, acting as a server) and connect (acting as a client). It is usually not related to the data flow. See the guide for more info.
Try to bind on your servers PUSH socket and connect from your clients PULL socket.
I have a client/server setup in which clients send a single request message to the server and gets a bunch of data messages back.
The server is implemented using a ROUTER socket and the clients using a DEALER. The communication is asynchronous.
The clients are typically iPads/iPhones and they connect over wifi so the connection is not 100% reliable.
The issue I’m concern about is if the client connects to the server and sends a request for data but before the response messages are delivered back the communication goes down (e.g. out of wifi coverage).
In this case the messages will be queued up on the server side waiting for the client to reconnect. That is fine for a short time but eventually I would like to drop the messages and the connection to release resources.
By checking activity/timeouts it would be possible in the server and the client applications to identify that the connection is gone. The client can shutdown the socket and in this way free resources but how can it be done in the server?
Per the ZMQ FAQ:
How can I flush all messages that are in the ZeroMQ socket queue?
There is no explicit command for flushing a specific message or all messages from the message queue. You may set ZMQ_LINGER to 0 and close the socket to discard any unsent messages.
Per this mailing list discussion from 2013:
There is no option to drop old messages [from an outgoing message queue].
Your best bet is to implement heartbeating and, when one client stops responding without explicitly disconnecting, restart your ROUTER socket. Messy, I know, this is really something that should have a companion option to HWM. Pieter Hintjens is clearly on board (he created ZMQ) - but that was from 2011, so it looks like nothing ever came of it.
This is a bit late but setting tcp keepalive to a reasonable value will cause dead sockets to close after the timeouts have expired.
Heartbeating is necessary for either side to determine the other side is still responding.
The only thing I'm not sure about is how to go about heartbeating many thousands of clients without spending all available cpu just on dealing with the heartbeats.
I am trying to use the ZeroMQ rep/req and cannot figure out how to handle server side errors. Look at the code from here:
socket.bind("tcp://*:%s" % port)
while True:
# Wait for next request from client
message = socket.recv()
print "Received request: ", message
time.sleep (1)
socket.send("World from %s" % port)
My problem is what happens if the client calls socket.send() and then hangs or crashes. Wouldn't the server just get stuck on socket.send() or socket.recv() forever?
Note that it is not a problem with TCP sockets. With TCP sockets I can simply break the connection. With ZMQ, the connections are implicitly managed for me and I don't know if it is possible to break a 'session' or 'connection' and start over.
You can terminate ZMQ sockets much the same way you terminate TCP sockets.
socket.close()
If you need to wait on a message but only up for a finite amount of time you can pass a timeout flag to socket.recv(timeout=1024) and then handle the timeout error case the same way you would when a TCP socket timeouts or disconnects. If you need to manage several sockets all of which may be in an error state then the Poller class will let you accomplish this.
The ZMQ Z-guide offers lots of good hints on how to structure your services to handle different scenarios.
I think chapter 4 can be of interest to you, especially the Lazy Pirate Pattern.
Check out the examples of Lazy Pirate Server and Lazy Pirate Client.
In general,
Make sure you setsockopt() on the socket such that send and recv will not block forever. (Temporary blocking – be it client or server – is OK, but infinite blocking is bad because your application cannot do anything else)
In the event that any of the I/O got an error,
If you are the client, close() the current socket and re-create a new one to establish a new connection
If you are the server, there's nothing else to do, you simply are waiting for a new connection. You will want to explore the Poller class.
I developed a chat server using websocket in cowboy, but I want to know if the message sent by server to client success.How can I know?
Websocket is a rather thin abstraction layer on top of a conventional TCP socket. After the initial handshake the difference is minimal. So, the question is: how do I know if a data chunk was received by the remote peer? The short answer: only if the peer acknowledges it explicitly by the means of application-level protocol. Remote client will send TCP ACK packets for every data packet you will send it, but this fact is well hidden from the application for good reasons. Receiving ACK packet only means that remote TCP stack has dealt with it, but says nothing about how (and if) the client application has processed it.
Add a special "acknowledge receive" message type to your chat protocol. Include a monotonically increasing sequence number in all of your outgoing messages, and include the SN of the received message in the ACK message to know exactly how much data the client has already processed.