Re: [Issue 3347] svn never times out when (public) IP changes

On Wed, 2009-05-27 at 20:23 +0100, Stefan Sperling wrote:
> A TCP keep-alive mechanism should only be invoked in
> server applications that might otherwise hang
> indefinitely and consume resources unnecessarily if a
> client crashes or aborts a connection during a network
> failure.

That RFC is paranoid about saturating links with unnecessary keepalive
requests, which is an outdated concern.

I'm confident that every TCP implementation supports keepalives.

> Still, could you explain more precisely why you would not want us
> to timeout after some predefined amount of time?

Just because we don't have a bound on how long each operation should
take. If the other side is present and responding to keepalives, then
either (1) it's still working, or (2) we have a bug and the protocol got
deadlocked. In the first case, we shouldn't time out; in the second
case, timeouts are a poor workaround for bugs.

------------------------------------------------------
http://subversion.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=462&dsMessageId=2355926
Received on 2009-05-27 22:25:12 CEST