On Mon, 16 Jun 2008, Phil Blundell wrote:

> One of our applications has a requirement that idle TCP connections should
> not be left hanging around for more than a minute. Right now, the multi
> conncache seems to be prepared to leave connections open indefinitely unless
> curl_multi_cleanup() is called or cache pressure forces some to be evicted.

Ah, yes. Similar things have been requested before so I think it is a fair
idea to persue.

A few things on the actual patch/approach:

o it needs to do Curl_disconnect() on the connections, not just conn_free().
   The lib/url.c:Curl_ch_connc() function should give lots of clues

o in a typical application that wants to keep connections alive no longer than
   60 seconds, it would need to call this function very often since the app has
   no idea about the current status of the connections. There could be 20
   connections timing out in 2 seconds or one in 59 seconds. Perhaps it would
   make sense to let the function return the time it currently knows until the
   next connection is about to timeout given the timeout value in the argument?
   That way the application might be able to actually hold off calling the
   reap function for a while - but it doesn't have to.

   An alternative approach is of course to do the entire timeout-check and
   closing of idle connections internally. That solves the "calling it too
   often" problem and it also helps us from adding a new function (new
   functions are a lot more trouble than just new setopt options).

o curl_multi_reap_idle_connections() feels like a slightly too long name, how
   about just curl_multi_close_idle() ?

o there was no man page added for the new function

o it would be really cool with a test case for it!

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se