To learn Erlang I am trying to implement a tiny web server based on gen_tcp. Unfortunately, my code seems to trigger some wired behaviour. To demonstrate the problem I have attached a minimised version of my implementation which is sufficient to reproduce the problem. It is just delivering a static 200 OK, no matter what the HTTP request was.
The problem arises when I try to run ab (Apache HTTP server benchmarking) against my web server (using loopback interface). Without any concurrent requests (-c) everything is running just fine. However, if I use -c 8 or -c 16, the call to gen_tcp:accept/1 seems to fail on some sockets as I see a number of request: closed lines in the shell.
What makes the whole story even weirder is, that I see different behaviours on different operating systems:
ab reports "Connection reset by peer" almost immediately after starting.ab hangs for a few seconds and reports "The timeout specified has expired, Total of 4998 requests completed", when i run ab with -n 5000. Similarly, 14998 is reported when I run 15000 tests.This one does not seem to be the problem. I am honestly quite lost and therefore appreciate any help! :) Thanks!
server(Port) ->
Opt = [list, {active, false}, {reuseaddr, true}],
case gen_tcp:listen(Port, Opt) of
{ok, Listen} ->
handler(Listen),
gen_tcp:close(Listen),
ok;
{error, Error} ->
io:format("init: ~w~n", [Error])
end.
handler(Listen) ->
case gen_tcp:accept(Listen) of
{ok, Client} ->
request(Client),
handler(Listen);
{error, Error} ->
io:format("request: ~w~n", [Error])
end.
request(Client) ->
Recv = gen_tcp:recv(Client, 0),
case Recv of
{ok, _} ->
Response = reply(),
gen_tcp:send(Client, Response);
{error, Error} ->
io:format("request: ~w~n", [Error])
end,
gen_tcp:close(Client).
reply() ->
"HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n" ++
"Content-Length: 7\r\n\r\n"
"static\n".
When you increase the number of concurrent requests sent with ab -c N it will immediately open multiple TCP sockets to the server.
By default a socket opened with gen_tcp:listen/2 will support only five outstanding connection requests. Increase the number of connection requests outstanding with the {backlog, N} option to gen_tcp:listen/2.
I tested your code on OS X with ab and saw this resolve the prolem with "Connection reset by peer".