What is the right thing to do if a socketChannel.close() got IOException?

Question

I have a class that wraps socketChannel and has a close() method as follows:

public void close() {
    // ... logic ...
    try {
        socketChannel.close();
    } catch (IOException e) {
          // ???
    }
    this.isConnected = false;
}

I want in the end of this operation that socketChannel will be closed and not registered to its selector. I read and found that the above code is sufficient for that, but what happens if I got an IOException?

My feeling is that "swallowing" it is enough, but am i missing something?

Answer 1

The answer will depend on whether it matters that the close threw an exception. And if it matters, the next question is whether you need to do something about it ... other than reporting it.

Scenario #1.

A web server gets an exception when closing the output stream it sent the response on. A typical cause is that the user closed his web browser or lost his network connection at the wrong moment. The server-side exception doesn't matter (to the server / server admin) and is not even worth logging.

Scenario #2.

You are doing something that involves talking to multiple servers, and it is important to know that they all "got the message". If an exception occurs in the close, that may be an indication that that didn't happen. Probably you need to log this. Maybe you need to tell the servers. Maybe you need to cause some enclosing transaction to rollback.