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Re: How to separate connection from request

From: Daniel Stenberg via curl-library <curl-library_at_cool.haxx.se>
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2021 09:41:02 +0200 (CEST)

On Thu, 17 Jun 2021, 6dsovh35--- via curl-library wrote:

> I'm trying to build a transport service that will maintain open connections
> to various services and send requests off as I receive them. I would like to
> build a curl session and connect it (including openssl handling) in my
> parent process and reuse that connection in my child process after it has
> been forked to actually send the request payload to the destination. I don't
> know what the request will be when I'm trying to open the connection so
> would like to keep from making a random curl_easy_perform that is likely to
> return an error. How can I accomplish this? I did stumble across a
> connect_only config that seemed like it would tell curl to only connect, but
> if I understand it correctly it then disables any reuse on that socket which
> is not what I'm after. Is what I'm seeking to do possible?

To me, this sounds like you want to do what I'd call "pre-connects". That is,
connect to the server before you know if you want to issue a request to it, in
order to have the request done faster later on if it indeed needs to be done.

libcurl doesn't have any (current) API that allows such connects without a
request. The CONNECT_ONLY requests stops after the connect and that connection
can't be reused again.

I have two suggestions on how to move forward:

1 - Issue a basic HEAD request and ignore the response. That's very little
traffic so it almost achieves the same thing, just with some data back and
forth as well.

2 - Introduce new functionality to libcurl that is a CONNECT_ONLY flavor that
makes a normal connection left in the connection cache, possible to get reused
in subsequent requests. Most of the logic should be the same as CONNECT_ONLY.

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se
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Received on 2021-06-18