Earlier today I noticed some calls to php fwrite failing as the destination socket was in a mixed state. There were numerous connections stuck in SYN_SENT and were seemingly not coming back as failures.
What is the best way to detect this and simply time out the connection if x bits haven't bit transmitted over the wire?
I believe you are looking for stream_set_timeout. An example:
stream_set_timeout($fp, 2);
fwrite($fp, "GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n");
You can check whether a time-out happens by checking the meta data of the stream:
$info = stream_get_meta_data($fp);
// $info['timed_out'] == true : time-out has happened
Related
I am creating a socket in this way:
$fp = fsockopen("tcp://".$ip, $port, $errno, $errstr);
stream_set_timeout($fp, 1); // timeout is one second
stream_set_blocking($fp, 1); // block until data is available
However, when I read I always get a timeout, even after reading data:
while(true) {
$result = fgets($fp, 4096);
if(empty($result)) {
break;
}
else {
echo $result;
}
}
I think my method of reading is wrong because I don't fully understand how php sockets work in the background. My intent is to read until there's no more data, or give up if I've tried to read data for a certain amount of time but no data has become available.
In various PHP socket examples I've seen the use of a while(!feof($fp)) to stop a read loop, but as far as I'm concerned the other end will never send an eof marker. They only send newline delimited messages.
Any ideas?
Thanks.
I want to have an HTTP GET request sent from PHP. Example:
http://tracker.example.com?product_number=5230&price=123.52
The idea is to do server-side web-analytics: Instead of sending tracking
information from JavaScript to a server, the server sends tracking
information directly to another server.
Requirements:
The request should take as little time as possible, in order to not
noticeably delay processing of the PHP page.
The response from the tracker.example.com does not need to be
checked. As examples, some possible responses from
tracker.example.com:
200: That's fine, but no need to check that.
404: Bad luck, but - again - no need to check that.
301: Although a redirect would be appropriate, it would delay
processing of the PHP page, so don't do that.
In short: All responses can be discarded.
Ideas for solutions:
In a now deleted answer, someone suggested calling command line
curl from PHP in a shell process. This seems like a good idea,
only that I don't know if forking a lot of shell processes under
heavy load is a wise thing to do.
I found php-ga, a package for doing server-side Google
Analytics from PHP. On the project's page, it is
mentioned: "Can be configured to [...] use non-blocking requests."
So far I haven't found the time to investigate what method php-ga
uses internally, but this method could be it!
In a nutshell: What is the best solution to do generic server-side
tracking/analytics from PHP.
Unfortunately PHP by definition is blocking. While this holds true for the majority of functions and operations you will normally be handling, the current scenario is different.
The process which I like to call HTTP-Ping, requires that you only touch a specific URI, forcing the specific server to boot-strap it's internal logic. Some functions allow you to achieve something very similar to this HTTP-ping, by not waiting for a response.
Take note that the process of pinging an url, is a two step process:
Resolve the DNS
Making the request
While making the request should be rather fast once the DNS is resolved and the connection is made, there aren't many ways of making the DNS resolve faster.
Some ways of doing an http-ping are:
cURL, by setting CONNECTION_TIMEOUT to a low value
fsockopen by closing immediately after writing
stream_socket_client (same as fsockopen) and also adding STREAM_CLIENT_ASYNC_CONNECT
While both cURL and fsockopen are both blocking while the DNS is being resolved. I have noticed that fsockopen is significantly faster, even in worst case scenarios.
stream_socket_client on the other hand should fix the problem regarding DNS resolving and should be the optimal solution in this scenario, but I have not managed to get it to work.
One final solution is to start another thread/process that does this for you. Making a system call for this should work, but also forking the current process should do that also. Unfortunately both are not really safe in applications where you can't control the environment on which PHP is running.
System calls are more often than not blocked and pcntl is not enabled by default.
I would call tracker.example.com this way:
get_headers('http://tracker.example.com?product_number=5230&price=123.52');
and in the tracker script:
ob_end_clean();
ignore_user_abort(true);
ob_start();
header("Connection: close");
header("Content-Length: " . ob_get_length());
ob_end_flush();
flush();
// from here the response has been sent. you can now wait as long as you want and do some tracking stuff
sleep(5); //wait 5 seconds
do_some_stuff();
exit;
I implemented function for fast GET request to url without waiting for response:
function fast_request($url)
{
$parts=parse_url($url);
$fp = fsockopen($parts['host'],isset($parts['port'])?$parts['port']:80,$errno, $errstr, 30);
$out = "GET ".$parts['path']." HTTP/1.1\r\n";
$out.= "Host: ".$parts['host']."\r\n";
$out.= "Content-Length: 0"."\r\n";
$out.= "Connection: Close\r\n\r\n";
fwrite($fp, $out);
fclose($fp);
}
We were using fsockopen and fwrite combo, then it up and stopped working one day. Or it was kind of intermittent. After a little research and testing, and if you have fopen wrappers enabled, I ended up using file_get_contents and stream_context_create functions with a timeout that is set to 100th of second. The timeout parameter can receive floating values (https://www.php.net/manual/en/context.http.php). I wrapped it in a try...catch block so it would fail silently. It works beautifully for our purposes. You can do logging stuff in the catch if needed. The timeout is the key if you don't want the function to block runtime.
function fetchWithoutResponseURL( $url )
{
$context = stream_context_create([
"http" => [
"method"=>"GET",
"timeout" => .01
]
]
);
try {
file_get_contents($url, 0, $context);
}catch( Exception $e ){
// Fail silently
}
}
For those of you working with wordrpess as a backend -
it is as simple as:
wp_remote_get( $url, array(blocking=>false) );
Came here whilst researching a similar problem. If you have a database connection handy, one other possibility is to quickly stuff the request details into a table, and then have a seperate cron-based process that periodically scans that table for new records to process, and makes the tracking request, freeing up your web application from having to make the HTTP request itself.
You can use shell_exec, and command line curl.
For an example, see this question
You can actually do this using CURL directly.
I have both implemented it using a very short timeout (CURLOPT_TIMEOUT_MS) and/or using curl_multi_exec.
Be advised: eventually i quit this method because not every request was correctly made. This could have been caused by my own server though i haven't been able to rule out the option of curl failing.
I needed to do something similar, just ping a url and discard all responses. I used the proc_open command which lets you end the process right away using proc_close. I'm assuming you have lynx installed on your server:
<?php
function ping($url) {
$proc = proc_open("lynx $url",[],$pipes);
proc_close($proc);
}
?>
<?php
// Create a stream
$opts = array(
'http'=>array(
'method'=>"GET",
'header'=>"Accept-language: en"
)
);
$context = stream_context_create($opts);
// Open the file using the HTTP headers set above
$file = file_get_contents('http://tracker.example.com?product_number=5230&price=123.52', false, $context);
?>
Could somebody help me with the php function fsockopen?
if I call the function like this :
$fp = fsockopen('xywqnda.com', 80, $errno, $errstr, 10);
With an unavailable host domain, it will never return false and I don't understand why!
Ah, you are using UDP. Your original example didn't show this. This changes things. From the PHP manual:
Warning
UDP sockets will sometimes appear to have opened without an error, even if the remote host is unreachable. The error will only
become apparent when you read or write data to/from the socket. The
reason for this is because UDP is a "connectionless" protocol, which
means that the operating system does not try to establish a link for
the socket until it actually needs to send or receive data.
try this
ini_set("display_errors","on")
it will show up a warning if the domain is invalid, other than that the function will return TRUE because the file pointer is returned, meaning file was created with success, FALSE will be returned only if it can't create the file.
// displays all warnings, notices and errors
ini_set('display_errors', 1);
error_reporting(E_ALL);
$fp = fsockopen('xywqnda.com', 80, $errno, $errstr, 10);
The connection attempt will timeout after 10 seconds.
You will get a warning because the domain is unavailable.
$errno and $errstr will contain the system error number and error message.
The function will return false, so $fp will be equal to false.
Documentation: fsockopen
I have a php server listening for 1 c# client.
When a connection is established, it is kept alive until client sends the command "quit" which kills the PHP server.
But when the c# client disconnects without the "quit" command (ie : clicking the close (x) button in the windows form) the server just keep listening, and can't receive any other connection from that client.
Is there a way to check from the server side (PHP) if connection is still alive with client?
My php server code is based on example1 of: http://php.net/manual/en/sockets.examples.php
If someone is interested in reproducing the bug/error behavior, paste code from example1 : http://php.net/manual/en/sockets.examples.php, connect by telnet from a remote client in lan, unplug client wire... php server will hang around forever, no new connection is accepted.
In your loop, you need to check the return value of socket_read(). If it returns FALSE, then there was a read error (which can be caused by the remote host closing the connection). The example code in the link you provided covers this case.
If you need to gracefully handle certain error states, you can always check the socket error code using socket_last_error() -- this note decribes the possible codes.
Edit:
When using putty for telnet, if i close with X button, connecion is closed properly in PHP, but if i unplug the ethernet wire of the putty machine, PHP server just hangs around.
The reason that the connection is closed when killing PuTTY is that PuTTY closes its open connection(s) when exiting. This causes socket_read() to return with an error code (I believe ECONNRESET). If you pull the network cable, it doesn't have a chance to do that.
Depending on how your network is configured, the TCP connection should eventually fail. You can attempt to control the timeout by setting SO_RCVTIMEO with socket_set_option(), but this doesn't always work on all platforms (I'm looking at you, WinSock).
Alternatively, you can roll your own polling loop using socket_select() with a reasonable timeout. If none of the connected sockets have data to send after your timeout, then kill the server.
I did this by checking if the socket_select() $read array includes the connection in question but socket_read() data is empty (twice).
It seems that socket_select() adds disconnected clients to the $read array and socket_read() gives an empty string '' when trying to read the disconnected client's data.
The following code will show the state of connection.
$address='example.com';
$port = '9065';
if (isset($port) && ($socket=socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, SOL_TCP))
&& (socket_connect($socket, $address, $port))) {
$text="Connection successful on IP $address, port $port";
socket_close($socket);
}
else {
$text='Unable to connect<pre>'.socket_strerror(socket_last_error()).'</pre>';
}
echo $text;
As Michael Dodd says, using socket_select() can have all sockets that have received data plus those they have closed. Also you can have all those that their buffer can accept data for transmission, and / or those that have raised some exception. Do have this info, a (separate) copy of sockets array must be placed in 2nd and / 3d parameter of function.
(if not needed, this function must have $null as a variable equal to null, not just null)
The following example shows how to read data and test sockets if they are still open. I am using this code for sockets that have been created by socket_accept() on a listening socket, and it is working without problems. Instead of using socket_recv, socket_read can be used.
//all sockets created have been inserted to an array $socketArray
//get a copy of the sockets array
$tempArray = $socketArray;
//this command will remove from $tempArray all sockets that have no data and are alive, with a timeout of 0 sec, 100 msec
socket_select($tempArray, $null, $null, 0, 100);
if (count($tempArray)) {
//if we have some sockets in the array
foreach($tempArray as $socket) {
//read some data
$count = socket_recv($socket, $socketData, 1024, 0);
if ($count) {
//your code to do what you want with $socketData
} else {
//find socket position in initial socket array
$index = array_search($socket, $socketArray);
//if found, remove it from array and close the socket
if ($index !== false) {
array_splice($socketArray, $index, 1);
socket_close($socket);
}
}
}
}
I am using PHP socket programming and able to write data to open socket but i have to wait for a long time(or stuck it)for the response or some time getting error like "Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded line number where this code is placed fgets($fp, 128), i have check the server it seems it has sent the response as expected but i am not getting why i m unable to get response.following the code using for socket connection and reading data.
functon scoket_connection() {
$fp = fsockopen(CLIENT_HOST,CLIENT_PORT, $errno, $errstr);
fwrite($fp,$packet);
$msg = fgets($fp, 128);
fclose($fp)
return $msg;
}
any idea???
Is by any chance your client on a different platform than the server? When I say different I mean Windows/Linux/Mac. These each have different line endings. fgets() is supposed to read a line which means it expects to find a certain line ending before it returns anything. If one system is sending for example \n and the other expects \r\n it could cause this problem.