[zeromq-dev] Automatic reconnection, blessing or curse?

[Tom Quarendon]

I'm trying to get a handle on zeroMQ, and the when I read chapter 4 of the guide, thing I keep thinking is "isn't all that complexity just a by-product of the fact that sockets automatically reconnect after failure"?

I want to do a very simple RPC application between two endpoints. Let's say I want to something a bit like SSH or SFTP (it's on my mind and I'm trying to understand whether zeroMQ would be a good fit for such an application).  I can do this in raw TCP fairly easily, or at least I think I can, and if the connection goes down, then any attempt to read or write from the socket gives an error (the socket can survive the disconnection if you don't actually try to send any data), so I know when either the server process crashes, the client crashes or the network cable gets unplugged while I'm trying to send traffic.

Now in zeroMQ, using REQ/REP in a simplistic fashion, a number of things might happen. If the network cable is unplugged, then either the client will be unaware (if control is with it, that is it's not waiting for a response), which is probably good, or the client will hang forever, definitely bad. Similarly if the server crashes when processing a request, the client will hang forever. If the client crashes, the server will never know.
So you have to get into complications of polling the socket, applying timeouts, performing heart beating, adding serial numbers and retrying requests and so on, really to get round the fact that the connection will be automatically reconnected if the network is interrupted. Once you've done all of those things, how is what you end up with better than plain TCP/IP?

So I suppose my question is, why is this a good idea? Is TCP actually less reliable than I think it is? Do I just not understand TCP enough? Am I just trying to think about zeroMQ too much like normal sockets? Maybe zeroMQ is just not appropriate for an application such as an SFTP server?

Thanks.

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