class Rightscale::HttpConnection

HttpConnection maintains a persistent HTTP connection to a remote server. Each instance maintains its own unique connection to the HTTP server. HttpConnection makes a best effort to receive a proper HTTP response from the server, although it does not guarantee that this response contains a HTTP Success code.

On low-level errors (TCP/IP errors) HttpConnection invokes a reconnect and retry algorithm. Note that although each HttpConnection object has its own connection to the HTTP server, error handling is shared across all connections to a server. For example, if there are three connections to www.somehttpserver.com, a timeout error on one of those connections will cause all three connections to break and reconnect. A connection will not break and reconnect, however, unless a request becomes active on it within a certain amount of time after the error (as specified by HTTP_CONNECTION_RETRY_DELAY). An idle connection will not break even if other connections to the same server experience errors.

A HttpConnection will retry a request a certain number of times (as defined by HTTP_CONNNECTION_RETRY_COUNT). If all the retries fail, an exception is thrown and all HttpConnections associated with a server enter a probationary period defined by HTTP_CONNECTION_RETRY_DELAY. If the user makes a new request subsequent to entering probation, the request will fail immediately with the same exception thrown on probation entry. This is so that if the HTTP server has gone down, not every subsequent request must wait for a connect timeout before failing. After the probation period expires, the internal state of the HttpConnection is reset and subsequent requests have the full number of potential reconnects and retries available to them.