What are the issues with having a long open connection to a web server from a device connected via wifi?

Question

Hi there

I am aware of timeout settings for certain executions over the internet.

My iphone application is downloading videos over the internet via a wifi router connection.

I've heard that a connection like this shouldn't be open for more than 240secs? Is this true?

What dangers/security threats/issues/etc will I encounter the more I increase the timeout? Why do internet connections have a timeout at all?

For instance, if I increase the timeout to 10 or 20 minutes then is this bad practice? Bearing in mind this isn't a secure connection or anything, its just a normal connect - download data style connection.

For anyone with iphone experience it is a NSURLConnection.

Thank you

Tom

Answer 1

If the connection had some activity on it, it would be okay to leave it open for a long period of time.

If you are talking about long periods of inactivity - that is another issue.

In such cases, I don't think it would be productive to increase the timeout - as the odds are, the server on the other end would wind-up timing out the connection.

So as this is unavoidable (or uncontrollable by you, the client) - I would advise you to close the connection and re-open when need to communicate again.