TCP Socket no connection timeout

Question

I open a TCP socket and connect it to another socket somewhere else on the network. I can then successfully send and receive data. I have a timer that sends something to the socket every second.

I then rudely interrupt the connection by forcibly losing the connection (pulling out the Ethernet cable in this case). My socket is still reporting that it is successfully writing data out every second. This continues for approximately 1hour and 30 minutes, where a write error is eventually given.

What specifies this time-out where a socket finally accepts the other end has disappeared? Is it the OS (Ubuntu 11.04), is it from the TCP/IP specification, or is it a socket configuration option?

Answer 1

If want a quick socket error propagation to your application code, you may wanna try this socket option:

TCP_USER_TIMEOUT (since Linux 2.6.37) This option takes an unsigned int as an argument. When the value is greater than 0, it specifies the maximum amount of time in milliseconds that transmitted data may remain unacknowledged before TCP will forcibly close the corresponding connection and return ETIMEDOUT to the application. If the option value is specified as 0, TCP will use the system default.

See full description on linux/man/tcp(7). This option is more flexible (you can set it on the fly, just right after a socket creation) than tcp_retries2 editing and exactly applies to a situation when you client's socket doesn't aware about server's one state and may get into so called half-closed state.

Answer 2

Two excellent answers are here and here.
TCP user timeout may work for your case: The TCP user timeout controls how long transmitted data may remain unacknowledged before a connection is forcefully closed.
there are 3 OS dependent TCP timeout parameters. On Linux the defaults are: tcp_keepalive_time default 7200 seconds
tcp_keepalive_probes default 9
tcp_keepalive_intvl default 75 sec
Total timeout time is tcp_keepalive_time + (tcp_keepalive_probes * tcp_keepalive_intvl), with these defaults 7200 + (9 * 75) = 7875 secs
To set these parameters on Linux:
sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time=1800 net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_probes=3 net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_intvl=20