Is it possible to close Java sockets on both client and server sides?

Question

I have a socket tcp connection between two java applications. When one side closes the socket the other side remains open. but I want it to be closed. And also I can\'t wait

Answer 1

If you are still reading from your socket, then you will detect the -1 when it closes.

If you are no longer reading from your socket, go ahead and close it.

If it's neither of these, you are probably having a thread wait on an event. This is NOT the way you want to handle thousands of ports! Java will start to get pukey at around 3000 threads in windows--much less in Linux (I don't know why).

Make sure you are using NIO. Use a single thread to manage all your ports (connection pool). It should just grab the data from a thread, forward it to a queue. At that point I think I'd have a thread pool take the data out of the queues and process it because actually processing the data from a port will take some time.

Attaching a thread to each port will NOT work, and is the biggest reason NIO was needed.

Also, having some kind of a "Close" message as part of your stream to trigger closing the port may make things work faster--but you'll still need to handle the -1 to cover the case of broken streams

Answer 2

You probably want to have a connection pool.

Answer 3

The usual solution is to let the other side know you are going to close the connection, before actually closing it. For instance, in the case of the SMTP protocol, the server will send '221 Bye' before it closes the connection.

Answer 4

TCP doesn't work like this. The OS won't release the resources, namely the file descriptor and thus the port, until the application explicitly closes the socket or dies, even if the TCP stack knows that the other side closed it. There's no callback from kernel to user application on receipt of the FIN from the peer. The OS acknowledges it to the other side but waits for the application to call close() before sending its FIN packet. Take a look at the TCP state transition diagram - you are in the passive close box.

One way to detect a situation like this without dedicating a thread to each socket is to use the select/poll/epoll/kqueue family of functions. The socket being passively closed will be signaled as readable and read attempt will return the EOF.

Hope this helps.

Answer 5

Both sides have to read from the connection, so they can detect when the peer has closed. When read returns -1 it will mean the other end closed the connection and that's your clue to close your end.