[Web-SIG] Most WSGI servers close connections to early.

[Benoit Chesneau]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Marcel Hellkamp <marc at gsites.de> wrote:
> I just discovered a problem that affects most WSGI server
> implementations and most current web-browsers (tested with wsgiref,
> paste, firefox, chrome, wget and curl):
>
> If the server closes the connection while the client is still uploading
> data via POST or PUT, the browser displays an error message ('Connection
> closed') and does not display the response sent by the server.
>
> The error occurs if an application chooses to not process a form
> submissions before returning to the WSGI server. This is quite rare in
> real world scenarios, but hard to debug because the server logs the
> request as successfully sent to the client.
>
> To reproduce the problem, run the following script, visit
> http://localhost:8080/ and upload a big file::
>
>
>
> from wsgiref.simple_server import make_server
>
> def application(environ, start_response):
>    start_response('200 OK', [('Content-Type', 'text/html')])
>    return ["""
>    <form method='post' enctype='multipart/form-data'>
>      Upload bog file:
>      <input type='file' name='file' />
>      <input type='submit' />
>    </form>
>    """]
>
> server = make_server('localhost', 8080, application)
> server.serve_forever()
>
>
>
>
> I would like to add a warning to the WSGI/web3 specification to address
> this issue:
>
> "An application should read all available data from
> `environ['wsgi.input']` on POST or PUT requests, even if it does not
> process that data. Otherwise, the client might fail to complete the
> request and not display the response."
>
> --
> Mit freundlichen Grüßen
> Marcel Hellkamp
>
Your application and client should be aware of Expect: 100-Continue header :

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

- benoît

(resent, because web-sig doesn't set well the default reply-to)