libwebsockets/READMEs/README.h2-long-poll.md
Andy Green ba754c4cb2 h2: unify immortal stream tracking across SSE and ws substreams
It was already correct but add helpers to isolate and deduplicate
processing adding and closing a generically immortal stream.

Change the default 31s h2 network connection timeout to be settable
by .keepalive_timeout if nonzero.

Add a public api allowing a client h2 stream to transition to
half-closed LOCAL (by sending a 0-byte DATA with END_STREAM) and
mark itself as immortal to create a read-only long-poll stream
if the server allows it.

Add a vhost server option flag LWS_SERVER_OPTION_VH_H2_HALF_CLOSED_LONG_POLL
which allows the vhost to treat half-closed remotes as immortal long
poll streams.
2019-09-22 03:08:36 -07:00

1.8 KiB

h2 long poll in lws

lws server and client can support "immortal" streams that are not subject to normal timeouts under a special condition. These are read-only (to the client).

Network connections that contain at least one immortal stream are themselves not subject to timeouts until the last immortal stream they are carrying closes.

Because of this, it's recommended there is some other way of confirming that the client is still active.

Setting up lws server for h2 long poll

Vhosts that wish to allow clients to serve these immortal streams need to set the info.options flag LWS_SERVER_OPTION_VH_H2_HALF_CLOSED_LONG_POLL at vhost creation time. The JSON config equivalent is to set

"h2-half-closed-long-poll": "1"

on the vhost. That's all that is needed.

Streams continue to act normally for timeout with the exception client streams are allowed to signal they are half-closing by sending a zero-length DATA frame with END_STREAM set. These streams are allowed to exist outside of any timeout and data can be sent on them at will in the server -> client direction.

Setting client streams for long poll

An API is provided to allow established h2 client streams to transition to immortal mode and send the END_STREAM to the server to indicate it.

int
lws_h2_client_stream_long_poll_rxonly(struct lws *wsi);

Example applications

You can confirm the long poll flow simply using example applications. Build and run http-server/minimal-http-server-h2-long-poll in one terminal.

In another, build the usual http-client/minimal-http-client example and run it with the flags -l --long-poll

The client will connect to the server and transition to the immortal mode. The server sends a timestamp every minute to the client, and that will stay up without timeouts.