Bug #4933: winsock listen backlog may only be set once, and is set to 5

• Status: Closed
• Assignee: -
• Target version: -
• ruby -v: ruby 1.8.7 (2011-02-18 patchlevel 334) [i386-mingw32]

[ghazel (Greg Hazel)]

This is commonly observed as a bug in Windows servers, where under light load clients begin to get ECONNREFUSED. This occurs even if the listen backlog is set to a high value, like 1024. The bug is that Ruby sets the value to 5 on creation of a TCPServer socket, and it is not valid in Winsock to set the listen backlog size a second time.

From: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms739168(v=vs.85).aspx
"If the listen function is called on an already listening socket, it will return success without changing the value for the backlog parameter."

Here's where ruby sets it:
http://svn.ruby-lang.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/tags/v1_8_7_334/ext/socket/socket.c?revision=30912&view=markup#l1283

So one of two things needs to happen. Either:

• on WIN32 Ruby should avoid setting the listen backlog by default, which would allow the user to choose the value but could conceivably break applications where were being lazy and not setting it at all
• on WIN32 and maybe all platforms, Ruby should set the default listen backlog to SOMAXCONN (or something large) instead of 5. This will not break any existing code today, as an overly high listen backlog is not really a problem.

Other default listen backlog values of servers:
Mongrel tries to use 1024 (but silently fails on Windows because of this bug): https://github.com/mongrel/mongrel/blob/74290abc9ebd287542b2dcc0133fa41d33e5177b/lib/mongrel/tcphack.rb#L13
Unicorn uses 1024: https://github.com/defunkt/unicorn/blob/b3b6b0dff19f8a22a96525bba22bf061d03c3fc5/lib/unicorn/socket_helper.rb#L27
Tornado uses 128: https://github.com/facebook/tornado/blob/9d1af05323f9a7941e2336ce50972de65e18bcdd/tornado/httpserver.py#L214
EventMachine uses 100: https://github.com/eventmachine/eventmachine/blob/master/ext/em.cpp#L1539
Twisted uses 50: http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/browser/tags/releases/twisted-11.0.0/twisted/internet/tcp.py#L828

[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

• Status changed from Open to Closed

OK, I see. But the bug is a dup of #4934 (with different ruby version). To avoid confusion, I close this for now. Once #4934 is fixed, this one can be reopened and I can backport that fix to 1.8.

[ghazel (Greg Hazel)]

• File listen_backlog_increase.patch listen_backlog_increase.patch added

Here is a patch to set the default value to 1024.