Re: How do web servers handle dropped connections?

[Steve Mosher <goat () DEVIL ISN NET>]

On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Philip Rowlands wrote:

> In practice, I believe webservers will allow a spawned CGI process to
> continue to completion. The rationale (although I can't remember where I
> read this) is that Perl scripts, etc. might have files, sockets,
> database connections open and should expect to be able to complete
> whatever operation they are performing.

        I'm not so sure about Apache. I know it has a habit of trashing a
process after a timeout, regardless of what it's doing (not entirely, you
/can/ setsid() around it.) I can't say for certain that I've seen a
process die due to a disconnect, but I have a feeling that's the way
Apache works -- BBW, this is merely intuition.

> Consider the converse; you'd have to write ugly signal handling code
> into every CGI, to take account of a closed connection at any moment.
> You'd have to implement some sort of transaction rollback if you were in
> the middle of rewriting a text file etc... not pleasant.

        Yeah, it /was/ a bugger for timeouts that I had to work around.

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