We Keep Coding

Detect when Websocket is disconnected, with Python Bottle / gevent-websocket

I'm using the gevent-websocket module with Bottle Python framework.
When a client closes the browser, this code
$(window).on('beforeunload', function() { ws.close(); });
helps to close the websocket connection properly.
But if the client's network connection is interrupted, no "close" information can be sent to the server.
Then, often, even 1 minute later, the server still believes the client is connected, and the websocket is still open on the server.
Question: How to detect properly that a websocket is closed because the client is disconnected from network?
Is there a websocket KeepAlive feature available in Python/Bottle/gevent-websocket?
One answer from Web Socket: cannot detect client connection on internet disconnect suggests to use a heartbeat/ping packet every x seconds to tell the server "I'm still alive". The other answer suggests using a setKeepAlive(true). feature. Would this feature be available in gevent-websocket?
Example server code, taken from here:
from bottle import get, template, run
from bottle.ext.websocket import GeventWebSocketServer
from bottle.ext.websocket import websocket
users = set()
#get('/')
def index():
return template('index')
#get('/websocket', apply=[websocket])
def chat(ws):
users.add(ws)
while True:
msg = ws.receive()
if msg is not None:
for u in users:
u.send(msg)
else:
break
users.remove(ws)
run(host='127.0.0.1', port=8080, server=GeventWebSocketServer)

First you need to add a timeout to the receive() method.
with gevent.Timeout(1.0, False):
msg = ws.receive()
Then the loop will not block, if you send even an empty packet and the client doesn't respond, WebsocketError will be thrown and you can close the socket.

how to make autobahn / twisted websocket server restart / stay up after exception

I have a websocket server using autobahn where it runs some code onMessage.
during this code an exception happens and I perform a try/except clause so I can log the error, it logs correctly. However the connection to the client(javascript) disconnects.
The problem is that if I load a new page it does not reconnect to the websocket server. I attempted to put the code block to start the server in a while loop but the client does not connect succesfully.
if __name__ == '__main__':
import sys
from twisted.python import log
from twisted.internet import reactor, task, threads
logging.basicConfig(filename='/var/log/myerror.log', level=logging.ERROR)
log.startLogging(sys.stdout)
factory = WebSocketServerFactory(u"ws://127.0.0.1:9000", debug=False)
factory.protocol = MyServerProtocol
factory.setProtocolOptions(maxConnections=50)
reactor.listenTCP(9000, factory)
reactor.run()
Does anyone know how to make it so even if the code in 'onMessage' has an exception, the websocket server will continue to accept connections and give other clients the opportunity to run?

Found the problem. I had placed 'reactor.callFromThread(reactor.stop) ' elsewhere in the code and it was killing the reactor.

How to stop a Flask server running gevent-socketio

I have a flask application running with gevent-socketio that I create this way:
server = SocketIOServer(('localhost', 2345), app, resource='socket.io')
gevent.spawn(send_queued_messages_loop, server)
server.serve_forever()
I launch send_queued_messages_loop in a gevent thread that keeps on polling on a gevent.Queue where my program stores data to send it to the socket.io connected clients
I tried different approaches to stop the server (such as using sys.exit) either from the socket.io handler (when the client sends a socket.io message) or from a normal route (when the client makes a request to /shutdown) but in any case, sys.exit seems to fail because of the presence of greenlets.
I tried to call gevent.shutdown() first, but this does not seem to change anything
What would be the proper way to shutdown the server?

Instead of using serve_forever() create a gevent.event.Event and wait for it. To actually initiate shutdown, trigger the event using its set() method:
from gevent.event import Event
stopper = Event()
server = SocketIOServer(('localhost', 2345), app, resource='socket.io')
server.start()
gevent.spawn(send_queued_messages_loop)
try:
stopper.wait()
except KeyboardInterrupt:
print
No matter from where you now want to terminate your process - all you need to do is calling stopper.set().
The try..except is not really necessary but I prefer not getting a stacktrace on a clean CTRL-C exit.

Python queue with a delay time

I have a web server running on Django.
Users can create events postponed in time.
These events must be recorded in queue and processed on another server.
Initially I thought to take the Twisted. something like:
#client - django server
factory = pb.PBClientFactory()
reactor.connectTCP(server_ip, server_port, factory)
d = factory.login(credentials.UsernamePassword(login, paswd),)
d.addCallbacks(self.good_connected,self.bad_connected)
d.addCallback(self.add_to_queue)
reactor.run()
def add_to_queue(self, p)
p.callRemote("pickup", data)
#server - twisted server
def perspective_pickup(self, data)
reactor.callLater(timeout, self.pickup_from_queue)
But now I have big doubts about this approach. Maybe do not use twisted? or connect it with Django differently

Run twisted inside of Django is not a good idea anyway. So, try Celery or run HTTP server with twisted and use urllib on django side to send data to twisted server.

Slow Python HTTP server on localhost

I am experiencing some performance problems when creating a very simple Python HTTP server. The key issue is that performance is varying depending on which client I use to access it, where the server and all clients are being run on the local machine. For instance, a GET request issued from a Python script (urllib2.urlopen('http://localhost/').read()) takes just over a second to complete, which seems slow considering that the server is under no load. Running the GET request from Excel using MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP also feels slow. However, requesting the data Google Chrome or from RCurl, the curl add-in for R, yields an essentially instantaneous response, which is what I would expect.
Adding further to my confusion is that I do not experience any performance problems for any client when I am on my computer at work (the performance problems are on my home computer). Both systems run Python 2.6, although the work computer runs Windows XP instead of 7.
Below is my very simple server example, which simply returns 'Hello world' for any get request.
from BaseHTTPServer import BaseHTTPRequestHandler, HTTPServer
class MyHandler(BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
def do_GET(self):
print("Just received a GET request")
self.send_response(200)
self.send_header("Content-type", "text/html")
self.end_headers()
self.wfile.write('Hello world')
return
def log_request(self, code=None, size=None):
print('Request')
def log_message(self, format, *args):
print('Message')
if __name__ == "__main__":
try:
server = HTTPServer(('localhost', 80), MyHandler)
print('Started http server')
server.serve_forever()
except KeyboardInterrupt:
print('^C received, shutting down server')
server.socket.close()
Note that in MyHandler I override the log_request() and log_message() functions. The reason is that I read that a fully-qualified domain name lookup performed by one of these functions might be a reason for a slow server. Unfortunately setting them to just print a static message did not solve my problem.
Also, notice that I have put in a print() statement as the first line of the do_GET() routine in MyHandler. The slowness occurs prior to this message being printed, meaning that none of the stuff that comes after it is causing a delay.

The request handler issues a inverse name lookup in order to display the client name in the log. My Windows 7 issues a first DNS lookup that fails with no delay, followed by 2 successive NetBIOS name queries to the HTTP client, and each one run into a 2 sec timeout = 4 seconds delay !!
Have a look at https://bugs.python.org/issue6085
Another fix that worked for me is to override BaseHTTPRequestHandler.address_string() in my request handler with a version that does not perform the name lookup
def address_string(self):
host, port = self.client_address[:2]
#return socket.getfqdn(host)
return host
Philippe

This does not sound like a problem with the code. A nifty way of troubleshooting an HTTP server is to connect to it to telnet to it on port 80. Then you can type something like:
GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
host: www.blah.com
<enter> <enter>
and observe the server's response. See if you get a delay using this approach.
You may also want to turn off any firewalls to see if they are responsible for the slowdown.
Try replacing 127.0.0.1 for localhost. If that solves the problem, then that is a clue that the FQDN lookup may indeed be the possible cause.

Replacing localhost with 127.0.0.1 can solve the problem:)