Detect aborted connection during ASIO request
- by Tim Sylvester
Is there an established way to determine whether the other end of a TCP connection is closed in the asio framework without sending any data?
Using Boost.asio for a server process, if the client times out or otherwise disconnects before the server has responded to a request, the server doesn't find this out until it has finished the request and generated a response to send, when the send immediately generates a connection-aborted error.
For some long-running requests, this can lead to clients canceling and retrying over and over, piling up many instances of the same request running in parallel, making them take even longer and "snowballing" into an avalanche that makes the server unusable. Essentially hitting F5 over and over is a denial-of-service attack.
Unfortunately I can't start sending a response until the request is complete, so "streaming" the result out is not an option, I need to be able to check at key points during the request processing and stop that processing if the client has given up.
