Find out if network connection is lost using libpqxx

Question

I 'm writing a C++ client program quering a postgreSQL database via the internet. I want to handle the event when while waiting for an answer, a network connection problem occurs and so the client can't receive any messages from the database server. But when I manually turn off the internet connection the program remains idle even if I turn the connection on again later. Is there a way to catch this event or at least set a timeout on client-side so that it stops waiting for an answer after it?

Answer 1

You can set a timeout for any socket operation (different from connect) using timeval structure and call to setsockopt.

struct timeval timeout;      
timeout.tv_sec = 10;
timeout.tv_usec = 0;

if ( setsockopt (sockfd, SOL_SOCKET, SO_RCVTIMEO, (char *)&timeout,
            sizeof(timeout)) < 0)
    error( "setsockopt failed\n");

SO_RCVTIMEO option is used to indicate input operation.

You can also make a select calls to non blocking socket with a timeout parameter:

const int timeout_msecs = 5000;
struct timeval tval;
tval.tv_usec = 1000 * (timeout_msecs % 1000);
tval.tv_sec = timeout_msecs / 1000;

fd_set waitSet;
FD_ZERO( &waitSet );
FD_SET( fd, &waitSet );

int ret;
ret = select( fd + 1, &waitSet, NULL, NULL, &tval );

Finally, the technique showed by Richard Stevens in his "Unix Networking Programming" involves usage of system interrupts:

static void
sig_alrm(int signo)
{
    return;         /* just interrupt the recvfrom() */
}

void
dg_cli(FILE *fp, int sockfd, const SA *pservaddr, socklen_t servlen)
{
    int n;
    char    sendline[MAXLINE], recvline[MAXLINE + 1];

    Signal(SIGALRM, sig_alrm);

    while (Fgets(sendline, MAXLINE, fp) != NULL) {

        Sendto(sockfd, sendline, strlen(sendline), 0, pservaddr, servlen);

        alarm(5);
        // call recvfrom with 5 seconds timeout
        if ( (n = recvfrom(sockfd, recvline, MAXLINE, 0, NULL, NULL)) < 0) {
            if (errno == EINTR)
                fprintf(stderr, "socket timeout\n");
            else
                err_sys("recvfrom error");
        } else {
            alarm(0);
            recvline[n] = 0;    /* null terminate */
            Fputs(recvline, stdout);
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

After searching around following private data public channel 2 suggestion to use socket operations I've reached to the following solution:

pqxx::connection conn("host=blabla.com "
                    "port=5432 "
                    "user=abla "
                    "password=abla "
                    "dbname=ablabla");


        const int val1 = 1;

        if ( setsockopt(conn.sock(), SOL_SOCKET, SO_KEEPALIVE, &val1, sizeof(val1)) < 0){
            perror( "setsockopt failed\n");
        }

        const int val2 = 5;

        if ( setsockopt(conn.sock(), IPPROTO_TCP, TCP_KEEPCNT, &val2, sizeof(val2)) < 0){
            perror( "setsockopt failed\n");
        }
        const int val3 = 2;

        if ( setsockopt(conn.sock(), IPPROTO_TCP, TCP_KEEPINTVL, &val3, sizeof(val3)) < 0){
            perror( "setsockopt failed\n");
        }
        const int val4 = 10;
        if ( setsockopt(conn.sock(), IPPROTO_TCP, TCP_KEEPIDLE, &val4, sizeof(val4)) < 0){
            perror( "setsockopt failed\n");
        }

        TransactorImpl transac();
        conn.perform(transac,10);

This way 10 seconds after I disconnect from the network the socket starts sending probes to ensure the connection is OK and after a while it aborts the connection and my overriden on_abort() function is called and after that libpqxx retries to execute the query. The number of retries is specified by the second argument of the perform() function (in this case 10).