Aborting a GET in progress

[Joe Orton]

Hi Jeff!

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 08:00:04PM -0400, Jeff Johnson wrote:
> Is it feasible to abort a GET operation in progress but
> preserve the connection session for performance?

To "abort" a request it's necessary to either read the entire response 
body off the connection, or close it.

> Is it sufficient to destroy a request to abort an operation
> or should I proceed to attempt ne_close_connection() or
> even destroy/recreate the session in order to abort a
> transfer in progress?

Destroying the request object then calling ne_close_connection() would 
be sufficient.

I'm presuming you are using ne_begin_request()/ne_end_request(), and 
that you have a good estimate of the total response length based on the 
RPM header metadata from the response block(s) which are read?

You have a trade-off: reading and discarding the entire response may be 
slow if it's huge, but, if it's small then it may be faster than closing 
the connection and re-opening.  I'd recommend some kind of heuristic:

  if expected-response-length < 256K (maybe):
    ne_discard_response()
    ne_end_request()
    ne_request_destroy()
  else:
    ne_request_destroy()
    close connection

Regards, Joe