Re: [hybi] WS close code equivalent to HTTP 500/Internal Server Error

[Peter Thorson <[e-mail]>]

A quick search through the hybi list logs indicates code 1011 has only been mentioned in relation to this error condition.

On Nov 29, 2011, at 8:18 , Alexey Melnikov wrote:

> Peter Thorson wrote:
>> This issue came up while polishing up the error handling code for my WS implementation. There doesn't seem to be a websocket close code equivalent to HTTP 500/Internal server error.
>> 
>> I would like to handle situations where my endpoint catches an internal logic error and knows that continuing the connection will probably result in bad/unknown behavior but knows that it is safe enough to close the connection cleanly.
>> 
>> Example: I am a server and my handler for processing websocket messages is interpreted code and that code has a syntax error. The websocket server itself is fine and can safely close the connection but clearly cannot process messages until someone fixes the missing semicolon somewhere. In an HTTP server I would return 500/Internal Server error to indicate that something on the server end screwed up and that there is probably more information in the server log files to diagnose further.
>> 
>> None of the current close codes (except 1006/abnormal closure - which isn't allowed on the wire) really fit. I'd rather not just drop the connection uncleanly/send back empty close frame since that provides no information about what happened and makes figuring out whose logs I should be looking at as an end application developer difficult. Browsers only report the status code itself and not the reason so sending a normal/going away error code with a more specific reason is less helpful. What are other implementations doing in this case? Would another close code for internal server error make sense?
> Let's use 1011 for this (Unless I already suggested it be used for something else. Please correct me if I did.):
> 
> 1011
>      1011 indicates that a server is terminating the connection
>      because it has encountered an unexpected condition which prevented
>      it from fulfilling the request.
>