stopping asynchronous XMLHttpRequest - xmlhttprequest

I have impatient users who update a piece of data on a web page. The update triggers an asynchronous XMLHttpRequest and the response causes the page to update.
My question is this. If the user closes the browser window before the request completes, will the browser send an instruction to the web server to stop the request?
FWIW the users are using Firefox or Safari.

The browser should close the connection, which should result in the server getting a close/fin packet. At that point it is up to the server to decide whether it finishes processing or if it stops processing at that point.
I checked to see if I could find what Apache does, but didn't find any documentation on it.

Related

Selenium not allowing non XHR requests

We have our selenium server (java) which is opening an electron app to test. During our tests, it seems to just lose the program/process control when we make any non XHR request i.e. any TCP request (via tools like serialport) or if we do a DNS lookup for an app. When the execution of such code happens, things just stop working (the code is async and never comes into the try catch block that is enclosing it) and the test fails.
Has anyone seen this type of issue before?

Correctly timing out XHR Requests in React-Native on Android

We're facing an issue with handling unexpected behaviours when performing xmlHttpRequests on Android devices using React-Native. We've experienced behaviour where the app becomes unavailable to complete API calls, even though the device is connected to the internet perfectly well (browser can access non-cached sites just fine). The only way to resolve this issue for our users has been to completely restart the app.
To understand the issue and its severity, we wrapped all our API calls to a timer function in production and sent reports to Sentry whenever a request took longer than 30 seconds to finish. Now we've been receiving these kind of reports in the hundreds per day with the duration sometimes being in the hours or even days.
First, instead of using whatwg-fetch, we moved to using axios so that we can manually set the timeout of each request, but this ended up not helping at all.
Second, we dove deeper into understanding how React-Native actually implements timing out XHR requests on Android, and found that it uses OkHttp3 under the hood. OkHttp has a default value for connect, read and write timeouts and react-native allows developers to change the value of connect timeout here. However, OkHttp also has a method for setting a call timeout (everything from connect to reading the response body), but this has a default value of 0 (no timeout) and React-Native doesn't allow users to change that. More on okhttp timeouts here
My question is whether this can be the cause of our worries and whether it should be reported to React-Native as a bug. Lets assume the following case:
app makes an API call to a resource
okhttp is able to connect to the resource within specified timeout limit (default 10s)
okhttp is able to write the request body to the server within timeout limit (10s)
server processes request but for some reason it fails to start sending a response to the client. I guess there could be many reasons for this like server being disconnected, server crashing or server simply losing the connection to the client without the client noticing it. As there is no timeout here, okhttp will happily wait for days on end for the server to start responding to the request.
Am I missing something here or misunderstanding how timeouts work in okhttp? Is there another, perhaps better solution than implementing the ability for developers to set callTimeout on API calls performed on android? And also, isn't it a bit stupid that developers cant set their own write and read timeouts? Cant this lead to unexpected behaviour when you want to send large amounts of data in either direction on a slow connection? 10s is quite long, but perhaps not long enough for all use-cases.
Thanks for your help in advance!

Disable retrying of POST request via AJAX if connection was dropped

Problem
Sometimes important HTTP POST requests sent with AJAX got duplicated so several entries of the same data got created in the production database, that is of course not supposed by users.
What is important is that users have a poor internet connection and this request is taking a long time (9-20 seconds). We can't reduce this time because it is the requirements of business logic.
Requests are sent with http, not https.
Details
We have Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu) with PHP module loaded and two frontends: one for desktop (AngularJS) and one for mobile (React) devices. AngularJS is sending requests with the $http service, and React is using whatwg-fetch (tried whatwg-fetch-timeout also).
We know from Apache access.log and PHP logs that the same request is coming from the client several times and PHP processes them without the errors. But! These requests have response with 200 status code, %b > 0, and %O = 0, that means request is aborted before a response is sent (Apache logging format docs).
Reproduce
So we tried to reproduce and the same happens sometimes. The following case is just a reproduced case, but this happens on mobile devices (iPhones and Android phones) with different browsers installed. Also, we have repeated it in the Firefox under Windows.
Environment: Windows; both Chrome and Firefox; React frontend version; no proxy used.
That's what we found out: Google Chrome identifies the request as "Stalled", but is internally trying to send the request multiple times (and it is received and processed on the server actually), because it got the network error (ERR_CONNECTION_CLOSED). Only when the browser succeeded to fetch the response, it stops sending the repeating requests.
Gathered info
URL_REQUEST event log from chrome://net-internals/help.html#events (headers are also available there)
Google Chrome dev tools request screenshots:
Headers tab
Timeline tab
I personally can't reproduce this even once and I suppose a good internet connection is a reason for this.
I have googled a lot and even found some similar Chromium bugs, but nothing exactly about this problem.
Thank you in advance for any useful information.
I am also not pretty sure which tags should I set for this question, so if I should add or remove some, please tell me.

OnDisconnected method in singalr

I'm using singalr library to develop a real time notification web site using MVC 4.
My web app will run on several web servers so I need to manage connections using a db.
Every thing goes Ok exept that the OnDisconnected method is not fireing in all web browser.
It seems to work fine with firefox but using IE9 and all mobile browsers it nevers fires.
So here's my question, I don't won't to rely on this method and end up with lots of unused connections in my db. Besides, even if the Ondisconnected method will work find there is a chance that the server will go down and these unused connection will remain in the db.
I was thinking of a background method that will run every 1 minute let's say and compare the db's connections against the current connections.
The problem is that I don't know how to implement that or is it the best way to do so.
Is there a way to get all valid connection so I can compare with the db?
Thanks in advance
The OnDisconnected method should ALWAYS fire for every browser. However, when the OnDisconnected method fires may vary.
Here is the process that SignalR goes through when triggering the OnDisconnected method:
SignalR binds to the unload event of the browser and attempts to send an AJAX request to the server to notify it that the client is going away (disconnecting). IF that AJAX request successfully reaches the server the OnDisconnected method will be triggered immediately. IF that AJAX request fails to reach the server due to network conditions or other unseen conditions then the OnDisconnected will not fire UNTIL the ConnectionTimeout (configuration) has elapsed.
Soooo long story short, OnDisconnected should always eventually fire for every client and every browser. If it does not you should absolutely file an issue on GitHub.
Hope this helps!

IE8 Post Body Becomes Empty after form submission

Okay here is our setup:
Simple form being submitted via AJAX using Prototype 1.7 to a Apache server captured by ColdFusion. (We have noticed similar bugs on pages that submit form data in the conventional way but these pages are used far less.)
Some of our clients are reporting an error. After looking through the logs and doing live testing from their machine Firebug Light is reporting that the request was being sent with the post data.
However on the server side the post data is not present in raw logs or ColdFusion's FORM object or in GetHttpRequestData().
This problem has been isolated to IE only even when running Chrome Frame and is intermittent.
We can not reproduce this error with our IE8 installs on our machines OR on their machines running Firefox or Chrome.
Any thoughts on this extremely difficult bug to track down?
Do you have an HTTP proxy involved in this somewhere? We have had issues in the past, I can't recall the details, but I know that it had something to do with using AJAX to POST. The proxy was configured such that a certain combination of headers would make it misbehave. Take a good look at the HTTP headers coming from the browser, comparing one that works and one that doesn't.