Subject: [MMUSIC] RTSP: Timeout value when receiving partial message

From: Magnus Westerlund <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:17:03 +0200

Hi,

In Section 10.3, draft-24 says:

   The server MAY close a connection if he receives an incomplete
   message and if the message is not completed within a reasonable
   amount of time.  It is RECOMMENDED that the server waits at least 1
   second for the completion of a message or for the next part of the
   message to arrive (which is an indication that the transport and the
   client are still alive).

However, the usage of a 1 second timeout here is very aggressive and a
stalled TCP connection can easily fail to recover in a single second.
Lets contrast this with the timeout values in Section 10.4 that are 10
seconds. I would suggest that 10 seconds is a reasonable value also
here. Thus I suggest that we do change that value to 10 seconds.
Secondly I am also suggesting cases when this recommendation does not
need to be followed, under attack or other resource starvation.

Updated text proposal:

The server MAY close a connection if he receives an incomplete message
and if the message is not completed within a reasonable amount of time.
It is RECOMMENDED that the server waits at least 10 second for the
completion of a message or for the next part of the message to arrive
(which is an indication that the transport and the client are still
alive). Servers believing they are under attack or otherwise starved for
resources during that event consider using a shorter timeout.

Comments?

Cheers

Magnus Westerlund

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