On Wed, 30 Oct 2002, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:
Well, it's not really leaking them. As far as I can tell, the other end of the socket isn't closing the connection, so Twisted just keeps it open 'cause there's no timeout. If there were a timeout, that would mean that proxying certain things through HTTP might break. What I'm wondering is why _other_ webservers don't suffer from this problem. Do they have a timeout? Is there something else happening in Twisted that I'm missing? This is certainly a very frustrating bug to test for. (After all, it's possible that this is some impossibly obscure errno that we're not accounting for, too...)
Generally, one would rarely want to have sockets that don't timeout. To have sockets without timeout opens a server up to easy DoS attacks. I can't imagine a time when you wouldn't want to time out sockets, even if you're trying to tunnel something over HTTP. If you pull out an ethernet cable or a modem phone line, connections don't get closed either. Any assumption that connections will always close nicely is flawed. Though, maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by 'no timeout' Personally, when I was running high volume web servers, we'd tune down the keepalive timers to a fairly short interval to keep sockets from getting tied up too long, to prevent resource availability issues that we were seeing. J