[Proftpd-user] SITE CPTO and TimeoutIdle

[Oli Kessler]

Hi all

We are testing the mod_copy module providing SITE CPFR and SITE CPTO and facing a timeout issue when the SITE CPTO operation takes long.

The timeout we hit is the TimeoutIdle which we set quite low to prevent dangling connections but in turn terminates the SITE CPTO operation the hard way.

As the client is effectively waiting for the server, this is not an idle state of the client and IMHO should not trigger this timeout - in this stage, all depends on the server and its ability to complete the SITE CPTO request.

In our use case, we copy some GB of data around with SITE CPTO and this takes longer than the typical 40 second idle timeout we enforce (most clients are applications and GUI clients like FileZilla will automatically reconnect anyway).

What do you think about this?

Cheers,
-ok

[TJ Saunders]

Post by Oli Kessler
We are testing the mod_copy module providing SITE CPFR and SITE CPTO and
facing a timeout issue when the SITE CPTO operation takes long.
The timeout we hit is the TimeoutIdle which we set quite low to prevent
dangling connections but in turn terminates the SITE CPTO operation the
hard way.
As the client is effectively waiting for the server, this is not an idle
state of the client and IMHO should not trigger this timeout - in this
stage, all depends on the server and its ability to complete the SITE
CPTO request.
In our use case, we copy some GB of data around with SITE CPTO and this
takes longer than the typical 40 second idle timeout we enforce (most
clients are applications and GUI clients like FileZilla will
automatically reconnect anyway).
What do you think about this?

Sounds like a fair assessment and valid use case; please open a bug
report on http://bugs.proftpd.org/ about this. One question is whether
you would want mod_copy to send an interim response code to waiting
clients periodically, to prevent the clients from timing out the
connection from their end because they haven't seen anything from the
server?

(The mod_digest module has a similar timeout issue for cases where the
digest/hash of large file is requested, and takes a while to calculate;
a solution for mod_copy would be similar to what is done for
mod_digest.)

Cheers,
TJ