I have been developing my first TCP/Socket based application with Apache Mina, it looks great and easy to do things. I just want to ask a question here about Mina.
The server impose an idle time of 5 second will terminate the socket connection, so we have to send periodic heartbeat (echo message / keepalive) to make sure connection is alive. Sort of keepalive mechanism.
There's one way that we send blindly echo/heartbeat message just before every 5 seconds. I am thinking, there should be smart/intelligent way "Idle Monitor" if I am sending my business message and do not come to idle time i.e. 5 second, I should not issue heartbeat message. Heartbeat message will be sent if whole connection is idle, so that we save bandwidth and fast reading & writing on socket.
You can achieve it by using Keep Alive Filter (already present in mina).
Alternatively, you can achieve a smarter way of sending echo/heart beat by setting session idle timeout of client a bit smaller than idle timeout of server. For example:
For server side
NioSocketAcceptor.getSessionConfig().setIdleTime(IdleStatus.BOTH_IDLE, 5);
and for client side it would be
NioSocketConnector.getSessionConfig().setIdleTime(IdleStatus.BOTH_IDLE, 3);
Now, if there is no communication for lets say 3 seconds, a sessionIdle will be triggred at the client side ( and it will not be triggered at server side as timeout there is 5 seconds) and you can send an echo. This will keep the session alive. The echo will be sent only if the session is idle.
Note: I am assuming that at session idle, session is being closed at the server side. If it is other way around you will need to switch values of session idle timeout(e.g. 3 seconds for server and 5 seconds for client) and echo will be sent from server.
(I hope I'm understanding the question correctly)
I was having trouble keeping my session alive and this question came up on Google search results so I'm hoping someone else will find it useful:
#Test
public void testClientWithHeartBeat() throws Exception {
SshClient client = SshClient.setUpDefaultClient();
client.getProperties().put(ClientFactoryManager.HEARTBEAT_INTERVAL, "500");
client.start();
ClientSession session = client.connect("localhost", port).await().getSession();
session.authPassword("smx", "smx").await().isSuccess();
ClientChannel channel = session.createChannel(ClientChannel.CHANNEL_SHELL);
int state = channel.waitFor(ClientChannel.CLOSED, 2000);
assertTrue((state & ClientChannel.CLOSED) == 0);
channel.close(false);
client.stop();
}
(Source: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SSHD-185)
In newer versions (e.g. version 2.8.0), enabling heartbeats changed to CoreModuleProperties.HEARTBEAT_INTERVAL.set(client, Duration.ofMillis(500));
I'm not sure I totally understand your question, but you can send a heartbeat in an overridden sessionIdle method of the IoHandlerAdapter. You don't need to necessarily close a session just because Mina on the server side calls Idle. As far as a more intelligent way of maintaining an active connection between and Server and Client without this type of heartbeat communication I have never heard of one.
Here is an interesting read of how microsoft handles their heartbeat in ActiveSync. I personally used this methodology when using mina in my client/server application. Hope this helps you some.
Related
This question already has answers here:
Java socket API: How to tell if a connection has been closed?
(9 answers)
Closed 2 years ago.
So I'm in the making of a very simple server/client complex using java. So far I have managed to figure out what happens if the client quits, because then the server receives null while listening from any input from the client.
BUT - what happens if the client is connected and the server quits for any reason... the server is supposed to wait for input from the client, but how can the client know that the server is not listening anymore? For me the clients call to the server just goes into the void... nothing happens...
Can I do something to find out when the server goes down? Time-out, ping/pong or something?
As You surely can see I'm quite new at this, I'm just curious. This was a puzzle for me ever since I attended computer science at the university.
Thanks in advance. dr_xemacs.
(I am assuming you are working with blocking server socket and socket and not with non blocking ones)
Similarly to the server, reading from streams of a closed connection will return null.
However if you instead do not want to rely on this or a scared that the connection to the server could somehow persist, you can also use time outs (check this out! ) which will throw SocketTimeoutException when the time is up and, to keep track of whether the server is up or not, create a ping/packet to assure server is still up and running.
Edit: I did a quick search and this could be useful to you! Take a look!
How can the client know that the server is not listening anymore?
If the client doesn't attempt to interact at some level with the service, it won't know.
Assuming that the client has sent a request, a few different scenarios.
If the service is no longer listening on the designated port, the client will typically get a "Connection Refused" exception.
If the service is still running (in a sense) but it is not working properly, then connection attempts from the client are likely to time out.
If the service's host is down, the client liable get a timeout.
If there are network connectivity or firewall issues, the client could get a timeout or some other exception.
Can I do something to find out when the server goes down? Time-out, ping/pong or something?
You attempt to connect and send a request. If it fails or times out, that means the service is down. If you are designing and implementing the service yourself, you could include a special "healthcheck" request for clients to "ping" on. But the flip-side is that network and server resources will be consumed in receiving and responding to these requests. It can affect your ability to scale up the number of clients, for example, if each client pings the service every N seconds.
But a client typically doesn't need to know whether the service is up or down. It typically only cares that service responds when it it sends a real request. And the simplest way to handle that is to just send the request and deal with the outcome. (The client code has to deal with all possible outcomes anyway when doing a real request. The service can go down, etc between the last healthcheck ping and when the client sends a real request.)
Bottom line: Don't bother with checking availability in the client unless the application (i.e. the end user) really needs to know.
Your Server probably may be running on a certain port and so you can add a health check at the client side and update a global flag with status to let client know about its availibity :-
Socket socket = null;
try
{
socket = new Socket(host, port);
return true;
}
catch (Exception e)
{
return false;
}
finally
{
if(socket != null)
try
{
socket.close();
}
catch(Exception e){}
}
I'm using javax.websocket API in my app. I send messages from server to client like this:
Future<Void> messageFuture = session.getAsyncRemote().sendText(message);
messageFutures.add(messageFuture); // List<Future<Void>> messageFutures
I use async API because I really care about performance and cannot make server wait until each message is delivered, because server does smth like this:
for (i = 1..N) {
result = doStuff()
sendMessage(result)
}
So it is impossible to wait for message delivery each iteration.
After I send all the messages I need to wait for all the Future's to be finished (all messages are delivered). And to be safe I need to use some timeout like "if server sends message to client and client doesn't confirm receipt in 30 seconds then consider websocket connection broken" - as far as I understand it should be possible to do with websockets since they work over TCP.
There is a method session.setMaxIdleTimeout(long):
Set the non-zero number of milliseconds before this session will be
closed by the container if it is inactive, ie no messages are either
sent or received. A value that is 0 or negative indicates the session
will never timeout due to inactivity.
but I really not sure if it is what I want (is it?). So how can I set a timeout like I described using javax.websocket API?
The idle timeout could cover your case, but it is not designed to. The idle timeout applies more to the case where a client makes a connection, but is using it only infrequently.
The more precise feature for checking a timeout when sending is setAsyncSendTimeout.
Using both of these allows you to configure for the case where a client may leave a connection idle for minutes at a time, but the server expects relatively quick messages acknowledgements.
In my experience with Spring, the timeout implementation provided by Spring is not actually configurable. See How do you quickly close a nonresponsive websocket in Java Spring Tomcat? I am not sure whether this is applicable to your websocket implementation.
I have a Spring application that consumes messages on a specific port (say 9001), restructures them and then forwards to a Rabbit MQ server. The code segment is:
private void send(String routingKey, String message) throws Exception {
String exchange = applicationConfiguration.getAMQPExchange();
String exchangeType = applicationConfiguration.getAMQPExchangeType();
Connection connection = myConnection.getConnection();
Channel channel = connection.createChannel();
channel.exchangeDeclare(exchange, exchangeType);
channel.basicPublish(exchange, routingKey, null, message.getBytes());
log.debug(" [CORE: AMQP] Sent message with key {} : {}",routingKey, message);
}
If the Rabbit MQ server fails (crashes, runs out of RAM, turned off etc) the code above blocks, preventing the upstream service from receiving messages (a bad thing). I am looking for a way of preventing this behaviour whilst not losing mesages so that at some time in the future they can be resent.
I am not sure how best to address this. One option may be to queue the messages to a disk file and then use a separate thread to read and forward to the Rabbit MQ server?
If I understand correctly, the issue you are describing is a known JDK socket behaviour when the connection is lost mid-write. See this mailing list thread: http://markmail.org/thread/3vw6qshxsmu7fv6n.
Note that if RabbitMQ is shut down, the TCP connection should be closed in a way that's quickly observable by the client. However, it is true that stale TCP connections can take
a while to be detected, that's why RabbitMQ's core protocol has heartbeats. Set heartbeat
interval to a low value (say, 6-8) and the client itself will notice unresponsive peer
in that amount of time.
You need to use Publisher confirms [1] but also account for the fact that the app itself
can go down right before sending a message. As you rightly point out, having a disk-based
WAL (write-ahead log) is a common solution for this problem. Note that it is both quite
tricky to get right and still leaves some time window where your app process shutting down can result in an unpublished and unlogged message.
No promises on the time frame but the idea of adding WAL to the Java client has been discussed.
http://www.rabbitmq.com/confirms.html
I'm using the IA92 Java implementation for MQTT, which allows me to connect to a MQTT broker. In order to establish the connection, I'm doing something like this:
// Create connection spec
String mqttConnSpec = "tcp://the_server#the_port";
// Create the client and connect
mqttClient = MqttClient.createMqttClient(mqttConnSpec, null);
mqttClient.connect("the_id", true, 666);
The problem is that sometimes the server takes too much time to send a response, and it throws a timeout exception:
org.apache.harmony.luni.platform.OSNetworkSystem.connectStreamWithTimeoutSocket(OSNetworkSystem.java:130)
at org.apache.harmony.luni.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:246)
at org.apache.harmony.luni.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:533)
at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:1055)
at com.ibm.mqtt.j2se.MqttJava14NetSocket.<init>((null):-1)
at com.ibm.mqtt.j2se.MqttJavaNetSocket.setConnection((null):-1)
at com.ibm.mqtt.Mqtt.tcpipConnect((null):-1)
at com.ibm.mqtt.MqttBaseClient.doConnect((null):-1)
at com.ibm.mqtt.MqttBaseClient.connect((null):-1)
at com.ibm.mqtt.MqttClient.connect((null):-1)
at com.ibm.mqtt.MqttClient.connect((null):-1)
What I need to do is setting a timeout manually, instead of letting the mqtt client decide that. The documentation says: There are also methods for setting attributes of the MQ Telemetry Transport connection, such as timeouts and retries.
But, honestly, I haven't found anything about it. I have taken a look at the whole javadoc reference and there's no evidence of timeout configuration. I can't see the source code since it's not open source.
So how can I set the timeout for the Mqtt connection?
If you have confusion you can go to MqttConnectionOptions for detail.
String userName="Ohelig";
String password="Pojke";
MqttClient client = new MqttClient("tcp://192.168.1.4:1883","Sending");
MqttConnectOptions authen = new MqttConnectOptions();
authen.setUserName(userName);
authen.setPassword(password.toCharArray());
authen.setKeepAliveInterval(30);
authen.setConnectionTimeout(300);
client.connect(authen);
I don't know anything about ia92, but I'd imagine that the 666 in the connect() call is what you're trying to set the timeout to?
The timeout the documentation is referring to is probably the keepalive timeout. This is the maximum number of seconds (chosen by the client) that can elapse without communication between the server and client. I think this is what you're most interested in.
Retries on the other hand are most likely to refer to the retrying of messages that seem to have gone astray when sending messages with QoS>0. This will be something handled by the client library code though, rather than the broker. This is something that comes into play only after you've connected though, so I very much doubt it's your problem.
To be sure that the keepalive timeout is being set correctly, I'd try pointing your client at a modified mosquitto broker. You can modify mqtt3_handle_connect() in src/read_handle_server.c to print out the keepalive value when you connect. This will ensure it's doing what you think, but won't help with the actual problem I'm afraid!
What broker do you use? Really Small Message Broker V1.1 Alpha, Mosquitto, the broker that comes with IBM WebSphere? You need to set this timeout value in your server configuration. Because the system works that way. You set a keep alive value in your broker and send a ping from the client before that interval expires, in order not for the broker to close the client-server connection, and the process restarts. Actually, even if that interval expires, server will still not close the connection until the 'grace period' ends. See http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/webservices/ws-mqtt/mqtt-v3r1.html#connect
I'm implementing a java TCP/IP Server using ServerSocket to accept messages from clients via network sockets.
Works fine, except for clients on PDAs (a WIFI barcode scanner).
If I have a connection between server and pda - and the pda goues into suspend (standby) after some idle time - then there will be problems with the connection.
When the pda wakes up again, I can observer in a tcp monitor, that a second connection with a different port is established, but the old one remains established too:
localhost:2000 remotehost:4899 ESTABLISHED (first connection)
localhost:2000 remotehost:4890 ESTABLISHED (connection after wakeup)
And now communication doesn't work, as the client now uses the new connection, but the server still listens at the old one - so the server doesn't receive the messages. But when the server sends a message to the client he realizes the problem (receives a SocketException: Connection reset. The server then uses the new connection and all the messages which have been send in the meantime by the client will be received at a single blow!
So I first realize the network problems, when the server tries to send a message - but in the meantime there are no exceptions or anything. How can I properly react to this problem - so that the new connection is used, as soon as it is established (and the old one closed)?
From your description I guess that the server is structured like this:
server_loop
{
client_socket = server_socket.accept()
TalkToClientUntilConnectionCloses(client_socket)
}
I'd change it to process incoming connections and established connections in parallel. The simplest approach (from the implementation point of view) is to start a new thread for each client. It is not a good approach in general (it has poor scalability), but if you don't expect a lot of clients and can afford it, just change the server like this:
server_loop
{
client_socket = server_socket.accept()
StartClientThread(client_socket)
}
As a bonus, you get an ability to handle multiple clients simultaneously (and all the troubles attached too).
It sounds like the major issue is that you want the server to realize and drop the old connections as they become stale.
Have you considered setting a timeout on the connection on the server-side socket (the connection Socket, not the ServerSocket) so you can close/drop it after a certain period? Perhaps after the SO_TIMEOUT expires on the Socket, you could test it with an echo/keepalive command to verify that the connection is still good.