How does one handle slow client connections in node.js?

Question

Node.js is single threaded. If a slow client is making a request, I imagine it could block the thread until it completes. Does that make sense ?

How does one handle slow connections ? Does it make sense to just terminate a connection if it takes too long ? How does one determine this? How does one measure how long the request is taking, and terminate it if it is taking too long ? I'm not referring to the duration it takes to send back a response. I'm just referring the time it takes for node to receive all the data required to process a request. Is this a legitimate scenario ?

I imagine there must be some way to do this, otherwise it would be really easy to DOS attack a node.js server...

EDIT: In a post request, the data comes in, in chunks. So what if it just comes in slowly ? I'm not sure how to simulate this. But if this is a problem in node, it could equally be a problem in PHP etc, because you would just need to spawn many connection, all of which are very slow to attack a server.

Answer 1

It doesn't matter if client request data comes in slowly. I/O in node is asynchronous and non-blocking. So if a chunk of data isn't available on a socket for a long time, node can do other things in the meantime, such as receive chunks of data from other sockets.

You can set an inactivity timeout that fires when no data is seen on the socket for the desired length of time. For HTTP, you can set a global request timeout via server.setTimeout() that can automatically close the underlying socket or if you pass in a callback, you can handle the timeout however you want. For TCP, there is socket.setTimeout() .