async client stream does not know when a connection closes

[alex-shapiro]

Problem: When a connection closes abnormally, the client stream does not return or acknowledge the broken connection.

Desired Behavior: When a connection closes abnormally, the client stream resolves immediately.

Quick demo of the problem, using the async-client + async-server examples:

1. start the server
2. start the client (and it connects to the server)
3. kill the server with ctrl-C

The client stream remains open and shows no sign that the connection has closed. If the user sends a message via stdin_ch, the client accepts the message. If you send a second message, the client finally panics with a Broken Pipe IO error.

[alex-shapiro]

It looks like the problem may be a more fundamental Tokio issue: https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio-core/issues/192

[illegalprime]

this is very strange, the async stuff is just a wrapper around a raw TcpStream, I'll try it out with two raw async TcpStreams and see if I can reproduce it.

[alex-shapiro]

I solved the problem. The issue is in the async-client example, not in the websocket crate itself.

The example uses select to combine two streams: incoming websocket messages and incoming channel messages. When the websocket connection closes, the stream of incoming websocket messages resolves.

However, the select future is essentially an "or" future - it doesn't resolve until both streams resolve. Since the channel receiver stream hasn't resolved, it continues sending messages to the websocket sink. Since the connection is closed, the sink will start rejecting messages.

I fixed the problem by replacing the built-in select with my own combinator, and_select, which resolves as soon as one of the streams resolves. So as soon as the websocket connection closes, the client closes. Here's the gist: https://gist.github.com/alex-shapiro/ab398f5a6a59ebf182b50fd50790d375

[illegalprime]

@alex-shapiro thanks for the fix, I'm re-opening so I can fix the example. I think it could be fixed without a new combinator and selecting over channel messages and results of polling the websocket

[XiangQingW]

@illegalprime I meet the same issue when tcp is closed by peer. There is a way to reproduce this issue:

1. cargo run --example async-client
2. cargo run --example async-server
3. exit the async-server by C-c, and the async-client doesn't know this closed status until I send a message in the terminal.

Have any idea to handle this issue? Thank you very much.

[vi]

A non-websocket-related answer:

There's rather radical way: clone the underlying TCP socket and use the cloned sibling specifically for detecting connection reset.

Relevant Tokio issue: https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio/issues/483

[XiangQingW]

Thanks for reply. This is an amazing progress, however I can't get TcpStream in websocket-async-client.