How to identify a broken socket connection in Java immediately?

Question

I have a typical java client and a server. The client sends some request to the server and waits for the response. The client reads up to say 100 bytes of data from the contained input stream into an array of bytes. It waits for the complete response of 100 bytes to be read within a specified timeout period of say 3 secs. The problem here is to identify if the server went down or crashed while/before writing the response. Basically, we need to identify if the socket was broken or the peer disconnected for some reason. Is there a way to identify this?

Answer 1

How to identify a broken socket connection in Java immediately?

You can't detect it immediately, in Java or any other language. TCP/IP doesn't know, so Java can't know. The only sure way to detect a broken TCP connection is by writing to it and catching IOExceptions, and they won't happen immediately.

Answer 2

The best way to identity the connection is down is to timeout the connection. ie you expect a response in a given amount of time and flag if that response does not come as you expect.

When you have a graceful disconnection (.eg the other end calls close()) the read on the connection will let you know once the buffer has been drained.

However, if there some other type of failure, you might not be notified until the OS times out the connection (eg after 3 minutes) and indeed, you may want to keep the connection. eg if you pull the network cable out for 10 seconds and put it back in, that doesn't need to be a failure.

EDIT: I don't believe its a good idea to be too aggressive in automatically handling connection/service "failures". This is usually better handled by a planned fix to the system, based on investigation of the true cause. eg increased bandwidth, redundant connectivity, faster servers, code fixes.

Answer 3

If connection is broken abnormally, you will receieve IOException when reading; that normally happens quite fast, but there is no guarantees about time - all depends on the OS, network hardware, etc. If remote end gracefully closes the socket, you'll read -1 as next byte.

Answer 4

Assuming everything else works, if the remote peer - the TCP server - was killed then the TCP client will normally receive a TCP RST (reset) and you'll get an IOException in your client application.

However, there are lots of other things that can go wrong besides a process being killed. Basically anything on the network path between the two processes: a cable is yanked, a router dies, a firewall dies, etc. All of this will not immediately be detected.

For the above reasons the general rule is - as pointed out in the answer from EJP - that a broken connection can only be detected by writing to it . This is why it is always recommended that a TCP client and TCP server exchange some type of heartbeat messages at regular intervals. There are different ways to do this. I like best the method where the TCP client will - in the absence of data being received from the TCP server - send a heartbeat message to the server and expect a reply back within a certain time period. This way heartbeat messages will only be sent when really needed.

A sub-optimal approach - if you cannot implement true heartbeating - is to always read with a timeout. Set the timeout on the socket and then catch java.net.SocketTimeoutException . This will allow you to know that no data has been received on socket during x milliseconds.

It should be mentioned that there's one scenario where you don't have to use heartbeating, nor using the socket timeout: if the TCP client and the TCP server communicate over a loopback interface then a broken connection will always be propagated to both the TCP client application and the TCP server application. This is because, in this case, there's really no network infrastructure between the two processes. So if you have an existing application which isn't well-designed with respect to its TCP communication (ie it doesn't implement some form of heartbeating or at least reading with a timeout), then as a last resort you may 'fix' the problem by moving the two application onto the same host and let them communicate over the loopback interface.