Re: Request: timeout option for remote operations, esp. "git fetch"

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Nov 14, 2013, 08:01 UTC
Message-ID: <20131114080122.GA16327@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <5282748D.9000907@zytor.com>

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 10:33:49AM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> > Which means that your original wish may not be granted with
> > SO_KEEPALIVE at all, no?  I was wondering if you wanted a forced
> > timeout based on alarm(2), something similar to what you added to
> > git-daemon in 960deccb (git-daemon: timeout, eliminate double DWIM,
> > 2005-10-19).
> > 
> 
> Yes, something more like that on the client end.  SO_KEEPALIVE is better
> than nothing, but not really good enough.

Would it be enough to just use timeout(1), like:

  timeout 10m git fetch

That will time the _whole_ fetch operation, which means a legitimately gigantic but fast fetch would still fail. Setting a shorter timeout only for periods of inactivity on the network socket would catch killed or very laggy connections. But it would not catch a server that feeds you data at a constant but ridiculously slow rate.

-Peff