Why is it impossible, without attempting I/O, to d

Question

As a follow up to a recent question, I wonder why it is impossible in Java, without attempting reading/writing on a TCP socket, to detect that the socket has been gracefully closed by the peer? This seems to be the case regardless of whether one uses the pre-NIO Socket or the NIO SocketChannel.

When a peer gracefully closes a TCP connection, the TCP stacks on both sides of the connection know about the fact. The server-side (the one that initiates the shutdown) ends up in state FIN_WAIT2, whereas the client-side (the one that does not explicitly respond to the shutdown) ends up in state CLOSE_WAIT. Why isn't there a method in Socket or SocketChannel that can query the TCP stack to see whether the underlying TCP connection has been terminated? Is it that the TCP stack doesn't provide such status information? Or is it a design decision to avoid a costly call into the kernel?

With the help of the users who have already posted some answers to this question, I think I see where the issue might be coming from. The side that doesn't explicitly close the connection ends up in TCP state CLOSE_WAIT meaning that the connection is in the process of shutting down and waits for the side to issue its own CLOSE operation. I suppose it's fair enough that isConnected returns true and isClosed returns false, but why isn't there something like isClosing?

Below are the test classes that use pre-NIO sockets. But identical results are obtained using NIO.

import java.net.ServerSocket;
import java.net.Socket;

public class MyServer {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    final ServerSocket ss = new ServerSocket(12345);
    final Socket cs = ss.accept();
    System.out.println("Accepted connection");
    Thread.sleep(5000);
    cs.close();
    System.out.println("Closed connection");
    ss.close();
    Thread.sleep(100000);
  }
}


import java.net.Socket;

public class MyClient {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    final Socket s = new Socket("localhost", 12345);
    for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
      System.out.println("connected: " + s.isConnected() + 
        ", closed: " + s.isClosed());
      Thread.sleep(1000);
    }
    Thread.sleep(100000);
  }
}

When the test client connects to the test server the output remains unchanged even after the server initiates the shutdown of the connection:

connected: true, closed: false
connected: true, closed: false
...

Answer 1

Detecting whether the remote side of a (TCP) socket connection has closed can be done with the java.net.Socket.sendUrgentData(int) method, and catching the IOException it throws if the remote side is down. This has been tested between Java-Java, and Java-C.

This avoids the problem of designing the communication protocol to use some sort of pinging mechanism. By disabling OOBInline on a socket (setOOBInline(false), any OOB data received is silently discarded, but OOB data can still be sent. If the remote side is closed, a connection reset is attempted, fails, and causes some IOException to be thrown.

If you actually use OOB data in your protocol, then your mileage may vary.

Answer 2

The reason for this behaviour (which is not Java specific) is the fact that you don't get any status information from the TCP stack. After all, a socket is just another file handle and you can't find out if there's actual data to read from it without actually trying to (select(2) won't help there, it only signals that you can try without blocking).

For more information see the Unix socket FAQ.

Answer 3

Here is a lame workaround. Use SSL ;) and SSL does a close handshake on teardown so you are notified of the socket being closed (most implementations seem to do a propert handshake teardown that is).

Answer 4

The underlying sockets API doesn't have such a notification.

The sending TCP stack won't send the FIN bit until the last packet anyway, so there could be a lot of data buffered from when the sending application logically closed its socket before that data is even sent. Likewise, data that's buffered because the network is quicker than the receiving application (I don't know, maybe you're relaying it over a slower connection) could be significant to the receiver and you wouldn't want the receiving application to discard it just because the FIN bit has been received by the stack.

Answer 5

Since none of the answers so far fully answer the question, I'm summarizing my current understanding of the issue.

When a TCP connection is established and one peer calls close() or shutdownOutput() on its socket, the socket on the other side of the connection transitions into CLOSE_WAIT state. In principle, it's possible to find out from the TCP stack whether a socket is in CLOSE_WAIT state without calling read/recv (e.g., getsockopt() on Linux: http://www.developerweb.net/forum/showthread.php?t=4395), but that's not portable.

Java's Socket class seems to be designed to provide an abstraction comparable to a BSD TCP socket, probably because this is the level of abstraction to which people are used to when programming TCP/IP applications. BSD sockets are a generalization supporting sockets other than just INET (e.g., TCP) ones, so they don't provide a portable way of finding out the TCP state of a socket.

There's no method like isCloseWait() because people used to programming TCP applications at the level of abstraction offered by BSD sockets don't expect Java to provide any extra methods.

Answer 6

When it comes to dealing with half-open Java sockets, one might want to have a look at isInputShutdown() and isOutputShutdown().