Long Polling in Mochiweb - How to tell if client aborts request?

Question

I have a basic mochiweb polling loop that looks like the following, except it does other things instead of printing to the console and eventually returns:

blah() -> 
  io:format("Blah")
  blah()

loop(Req) ->
  PathParts = string:tokens(Req:get(path), "/")
  case PathParts of
    ["poll"] -> 
      blah()

This works great until the client aborts their request. For instance if the client window is closed, this process keeps running indefinitely.

I would like to know if there is an option in mochiweb's start() or maybe something else I'm overlooking that would have mochiweb automatically terminate this process, or at least send a message on client abort. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Looks like one solution is setting up another process to repeatedly call gen_tcp:recv(Req:get(socket), 0, 1) and looking for the result {error, closed}, then killing the polling process if it is received... Not sure if that's optimal though.