socket wedged forever in recv()

[Richard Jones]

On Sat, 25 Jan 2003 8:47 am, Geoffrey Talvola wrote:
> I have a Windows NT client application that uses httplib to make requests
> to a Windows NT server running Apache 2.0 serving up a cgi script.
> Unfortunately, if I reboot the Apache server, if a request is in-progress,
> the client will often wedge permanently.  I built a debug version of Python
> 2.2.2 and verified that the client is stuck in a call to recv() and will
> apparently never exit.  It's a little irritating that the client can't
> detect the situation and return from recv() with an error code at this
> point.  Does anyone know a way to get the client to notice that the server
> is gone?

With a timeout, as you've already discovered.


> I have a couple of ideas for workarounds.  timeoutsocket.py (1) can avoid
> the problem for non-SSL connections but it doesn't work for SSL connections
> at all, and my application needs to make some SSL connections as well as
> non-SSL connections.  I'm also going to try Python 2.3a1 to see if its new
> support for timeout on sockets works with SSL.

Apparently this _is_ fixed in 2.3


> The only other idea I had was to make these http requests in a separate
> thread so that I can detect the wedge and deal with it.  Ugly, but it might
> work.

Except you can't kill one thread from another. If you're single-threaded, you 
can use an alarm signal to interrupt the process. I think.


    Richard