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

[Tom Quarendon]

OK, thanks Pieter. I was hoping I might get the guru :-)
 
Can I pose my question in another way, just to make sure I understand?
I have an SSH connection to a remote machine from my laptop. If I close the lid of the laptop to go home, or walk to another office, the SSH connection dies. On the face of it, zeroMQ would seem to provide a solution to that. So would zeroMQ be a good fit as the basis of an SSH implementation that would survive me sleeping my laptop, or the Wifi being flaky? Ignore the fact that it wouldn't be compatible with SSH, and that it's probably simpler just to set up Kerberos, or certificate signon so that reconnecting is easy anyway etc, just can you say whether that would be a good thing to base an implementation of something like an SSH server/client pair on? Or would it be square peg round hole, it would work, but would be bending the technology? I'm just trying to get a handle on the kinds of things zeroMQ might be good for.

There's a lot of thought and intelligence gone into zeroMQ and the things that surround it, and on the face of it seems like it and the surrounding patterns have the potential to make writing good network code easier, I just need to work out whether it's applicable to the kinds of things I want to do.

Thanks.

-----Original Message-----
From: zeromq-dev-bounces at lists.zeromq.org [mailto:zeromq-dev-bounces at lists.zeromq.org] On Behalf Of Pieter Hintjens
Sent: 09 September 2014 11:19
To: ZeroMQ development list
Subject: Re: [zeromq-dev] Automatic reconnection, blessing or curse?

ZeroMQ does indeed hide some things which we're used to seeing with TCP.

Even with TCP, if you want to maintain a connection for any length of time, you need heartbeating. Otherwise you will hit cases where TCP reports no error, yet the connection is effectively dead.

We don't usually use REQ/REP in practice. Any realistic client-server work runs over DEALER/ROUTER.

-Pieter

On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 11:37 AM, Tom Quarendon <tom.quarendon at teamwpc.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> zeromq-dev mailing list
> zeromq-dev at lists.zeromq.org
> http://lists.zeromq.org/mailman/listinfo/zeromq-dev
>
_______________________________________________
zeromq-dev mailing list
zeromq-dev at lists.zeromq.org
http://lists.zeromq.org/mailman/listinfo/zeromq-dev