HttpSocket does not support connection keep-alive

[ghost]

Created by Christophe Vandeplas, 4th May 2012. (originally Lighthouse ticket #2854):

---

What I did

1. create an HttpSocket()
2. set the request parameters with 'Connection' => 'keep-alive'
3. do more than one request using the socket

What happened

Only one connection was performed.

What I expected to happen

The same socket/connection is reused.

Code example

$HttpSocket = new HttpSocket();
$uri = $this->Server->data['Server']['url'].'/events';
$request = array(
        'header' => array(
                'Accept' => 'application/xml',
                'Content-Type' => 'application/xml',
                'Connection' => 'keep-alive'
        )
);
for ($i=1; $i< 5; $i++) {
    $response = $HttpSocket->get($this->Server->data['Server']['url'].'/events/'.$i, '', $request);
    print_r($response);
}
$HttpSocket->disconnect();

This only prints one $response.
The subsequent $response are empty:

HttpResponse Object
(
    [body] => 
    [headers] => Array
        (
        )

    [cookies] => Array
        (
        )

    [httpVersion] => HTTP/1.1
    [code] => 0
    [reasonPhrase] => 
    [raw] => 
)

It seems that someone else had the same problem/feature-request in 2009: http://www.mail-archive.com/tickets-cakephp`@googlegroups`.com/msg01754.html

Thanks

[ravage84]

Link above is broken, should be this:
https://www.mail-archive.com/tickets-cakephp@googlegroups.com/msg01754.html

[ravage84]

After some debugging and research I think this is a limitation of the used function stream_socket_client().

Anyway, I couldn't get it to work, even when I made the connection persistent.

Then i tried it outside of CakePHP with the bare minimum:

<?php
$errno = null;
$errstr = null;
$timeout = 20;

$data = 'GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: CakePHP
Accept: text/html
Content-Type: text/html

';

$fp = stream_socket_client("tcp://www.example.com:80", $errno, $errstr, $timeout);
if (!$fp) {
    echo "$errstr ($errno)<br />\n";
} else {
    for ($i=1; $i< 5; $i++) {
        echo "<h2>try $i</h2>";

        fwrite($fp, $data);
        while (!feof($fp)) {
            $buffer = fgets($fp, 1024);
            echo $buffer;
        }
        echo "<h2>end $i</h2>";
    }
}
fclose($fp);

It fails at feof($fp) after the second write.

Hope this link is still valid to show the result of the script above:
http://69.195.223.90/21037-2/

@markstory I guess this is no issue anymore after the recent HttpSocket rewrite, right?

[markstory]

It might still be an issue as the new Http\Client still uses PHP streams under the hood. I've not looked at whether or not they support keep alives though.

[tersmitten]

Have a look at Socket.php from Zend Framework (using stream_socket_client). There seems to be support for keep alives.

[ravage84]

@tersmitten true.
http://framework.zend.com/manual/1.12/en/zend.http.client.advanced.html#zend.http.client.multiple_requests

The truth must be somewhere around here, if not where the connection is established:
https://github.com/zendframework/zf1/blob/master/library/Zend/Http/Client/Adapter/Socket.php#L315
But I don't see it.

[lorenzo]

Closing all enhancement requests that were not actioned in a long time. If you still think this a good idea and would like to help making this happen, please leave a comment.