.NET cancel stream BeginRead

Question

I have not been able to find a way to cancel/terminate asynchronous read operation after successful HttpWebRequest. There is no way to set timeout, ThreadPool.RegisterWaitForSingleObject is not working too. And closing the underlying socket is not an option too because neither HttpWebRequest/Reponse provide access to it.

Edit:

Sadly this approach that Sunny suggestet works only for HttpWebRequest.BeginGetResponse. For the stream that you get after GetResponseStream() for some reason RegisterWaitForSingleObject is not working - the callback is never called.

The situation is the following: I got an application that uses HttpGetRequest. It is build by using the default MSDN example for async httpwebrequest. Getting response is working like a charm. But on rare occasions the server that my httpwebrequest is connecting to forgets to close the socket. So I am hung on a infinite read from BeginRead.

In some rare occasions the other server forget

Answer 1

Why not RegisterWaitForSingleObject? You can use it for time out, and in the handler you can call request.Abort().

Here's an example. Btw, I have used simial approach before I found this article in the past, and it worked like a charm.

NOTE: The real end of the operation will happen on the next Stream.Read (of only the request/response was async) or Stream.EndRead (if the reading is async as well). You still need to capture the exception thrown in the EndXXXX handler.

EDIT: If the RegisterWaitForSingleObject never get called, then you have another issue, which is most probably a ThreadPool having not enough free threads. The callback for RegisterWaitForSingle object is called on a ThreadPool thread, and if there is no a free thread in the pool, it will never get called. You have some solutions:

1. Make your pages asynchronous. Why? How.
2. Change the max threads in the pool.

In any case, increasing the pool size will not help you too much. You have to inspect your code for resource (stream) leaks, and make sure that you not only call request.Abort(), but also close the response. Make sure than in your callbacks you use the proper EndXXX method, etc.

I nazdrave :)