From: Jonathan Gillette <jonathan@...>
Date: 2002-06-22T05:56:26+09:00
Subject: Re: detecting a socket dropping in multi-threaded app

Firestone, Mark - Technical Support (mark.firestone@gossgraphic.co.uk) wrote:
> If I set abort on exception = true, then the @socket.write command before
> the interator generates an exception I can trap, just before the whole
> program abends.

Yep.  You could wrap all socket read/writes in the begin..rescue block.

> I tried testing for nils after the @socket.eachbyte, but that doesn't work
> either.  I am not sure where to go from here.. ideas?  I don't understand
> your ping idea, as the client is a telnet session.  Maybe I am being
> thick...

Yeah, I forgot your client would be a simple telnet session.  In the same vein as a ping, you could have a thread watching for inactive threads and shutting them down.  So you could keep a timestamp on the last time a thread read a byte and shutdown the thread if too much time elapsed.  In my Ruby socket servers, I tend to stay away from trying to catch all the possible exceptions and just keep a single thread that monitors the others.  It's just less of a headache.  I guess I hate having to worry about missing an exception.

-- 

Jonathan Gillette
iNetZ Media