Description
Problem:
When creating a stream if you close it's related Connection there is no way to check via the Stream if the Stream is still open/valid. This can be a problem if you are assigning a Stream to their async task but handling Connection management behaviour in another task, especially if you split a Stream into a SendStream and a ReceiveStream and handle their respective logic on separate tasks. If you close a connection in one task, there needs to be a way for all related streams to know that their stream has been closed.
Solution:
A simple function within a Connection and respective Stream structs to query the connection's status would solve this problem quite easily.
if !stream.is_open() {
// Handle dead stream gracefully without having to call something like `send()` with garbage data or `recv()` and possibly blocking when receiving
}
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Does this change what s2n-quic sends over the wire?
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Nope, this functionality should already exist within
send()andreceive()in theory as these functions can error if the stream has been disconnected -
Does this change any public APIs?
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Yes, connections and streams will have a new function, this shouldn't conflict with existing usages of s2n-quic though as it's an addition.
Requirements / Acceptance Criteria:
- Will the Usage Guide or other documentation need to be updated?
- Yes, there will need to be a some documentation for this new function, a code example though is likely unnecessary given the simplicity of the function.
- Testing: How will this change be tested? Call out new integration tests, functional tests, or particularly interesting/important unit tests.
- Create a test that creates a valid s2n-quic connection between a client and server, open a stream, then disconnect the parent connection. Call the stream's
is_open()function and verify it returns false (or whatever return type/value that signifies a closed connection)
Original Question
So I've ran into an issue with the way I've architected my usage of s2n-quic. The way I have it setup is I have two long running tasks, one of which is a send task that has a tokio channel to send data to a given target via a split bidirectional stream, the other is a receive task that accepts new connections, opens a stream and receives data from the stream.
The problem with this is that if my receiver task closes a connection the send stream, unless I explicitly add an extra messaging channel for this, won't know the connection has been closed. This results in essentially leaking memory in certain scenarios as the send task will continue to hold onto this SendStream unless it attempts to send data to the target and get a send error, I'd really prefer to not have to manually ping all my streams on a regular basis to check if a stream is dead. And from the docs there doesn't seem to be a way to check if a Send/ReceiveStream is still open.
I could solve this by changing it such that the sending and receiving happens all in one async function call but then I'd have to somehow block and synchronize the the open connections after closing or opening one, which could impact response times, especially when handling many streams/connections.