Timeout dead connections

Catalin Patulea cat at vv.carleton.ca
Wed Mar 27 23:52:59 WST 2013


On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 11:47 AM, Matt Johnston <matt at ucc.asn.au> wrote:
> If the network cable has been pulled out, shouldn't the OS send a TCP RST
> packet eventually after some traffic and close the connection?
That tends to be an application-level concern. You could imagine that
a protocol can tolerate a day-long network outage if it has nothing to
send. TCP keepalive has a single system-wide timeout interval so it's
really not appropriate in most cases.

This is why SSH, IRC, etc. implement their own keepalive mechanisms,
so they can enforce whatever semantics/intervals are appropriate for
the protocol/circumstance.


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