Add a -rpckeepalive and disable RPC use of HTTP persistent connections.

It turns out that some miners have been staying with old versions of
 Bitcoin Core because their software  behaves poorly with persistent
 connections and the Bitcoin Core thread and connection limits.

What happens is that underlying  HTTP libraries leave connections open
 invisibly to their users and then the user runs into the default four
 thread limit.  This looks like Bitcoin Core is unresponsive to RPC.

There are many things that should be improved in Bitcoin Core's behavior
 here, e.g. supporting more concurrent connections, not tying up threads
 for idle connections, disconnecting kept-alive  connections when limits
 are reached, etc. All are fairly big, risky changes.

Disabling keep-alive is a simple workaround. It's often not easy to turn
 off the keep-alive support in the client where it may be buried in some
 platform library.

If you are one of the few who really needs persistent connections you
 probably know that you want them and can find a switch; while if you
 don't and the misbehavior is hitting you it is hard to discover the
 source of your problems is keepalive related.  Given that it is best
 to default to off until they're handled better.

Github-Merge: #5655
Rebased-From: 16a5c18cea7330bd68dc9d2f768eb518af88795b 56c1093dae0c523f9f643f00c67414691272a983 1dd8ee72afc26191da51d8d3a5590eab7c9368f6

2 files changed, 32 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/qa/rpc-tests/httpbasics.py b/qa/rpc-tests/httpbasics.py
index a94edaffa5..8cbf1d7f4c 100755
--- a/qa/rpc-tests/httpbasics.py
+++ b/qa/rpc-tests/httpbasics.py
@@ -20,7 +20,10 @@ try:
 except ImportError:
     import urlparse
 
-class RESTTest (BitcoinTestFramework):        
+class HTTPBasicsTest (BitcoinTestFramework):        
+    def setup_nodes(self):
+        return start_nodes(4, self.options.tmpdir, extra_args=[['-rpckeepalive=1'], ['-rpckeepalive=0'], [], []])
+
     def run_test(self):        
         
         #################################################
@@ -71,6 +74,29 @@ class RESTTest (BitcoinTestFramework):
         assert_equal('"error":null' in out1, True)
         assert_equal(conn.sock!=None, False) #now the connection must be closed after the response        
         
+        #node1 (2nd node) is running with disabled keep-alive option
+        urlNode1 = urlparse.urlparse(self.nodes[1].url)
+        authpair = urlNode1.username + ':' + urlNode1.password
+        headers = {"Authorization": "Basic " + base64.b64encode(authpair)}
+                
+        conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(urlNode1.hostname, urlNode1.port)
+        conn.connect()
+        conn.request('GET', '/', '{"method": "getbestblockhash"}', headers)
+        out1 = conn.getresponse().read();
+        assert_equal('"error":null' in out1, True)
+        assert_equal(conn.sock!=None, False) #connection must be closed because keep-alive was set to false
+        
+        #node2 (third node) is running with standard keep-alive parameters which means keep-alive is off
+        urlNode2 = urlparse.urlparse(self.nodes[2].url)
+        authpair = urlNode2.username + ':' + urlNode2.password
+        headers = {"Authorization": "Basic " + base64.b64encode(authpair)}
+                
+        conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(urlNode2.hostname, urlNode2.port)
+        conn.connect()
+        conn.request('GET', '/', '{"method": "getbestblockhash"}', headers)
+        out1 = conn.getresponse().read();
+        assert_equal('"error":null' in out1, True)
+        assert_equal(conn.sock!=None, False) #connection must be closed because bitcoind should use keep-alive by default
         
 if __name__ == '__main__':
-    RESTTest ().main ()
+    HTTPBasicsTest ().main ()
diff --git a/qa/rpc-tests/test_framework.py b/qa/rpc-tests/test_framework.py
index 6c4ec073c2..4c8a11b821 100755
--- a/qa/rpc-tests/test_framework.py
+++ b/qa/rpc-tests/test_framework.py
@@ -33,8 +33,11 @@ class BitcoinTestFramework(object):
         print("Initializing test directory "+self.options.tmpdir)
         initialize_chain(self.options.tmpdir)
 
+    def setup_nodes(self):
+        return start_nodes(4, self.options.tmpdir)
+
     def setup_network(self, split = False):
-        self.nodes = start_nodes(4, self.options.tmpdir)
+        self.nodes = self.setup_nodes()
 
         # Connect the nodes as a "chain".  This allows us
         # to split the network between nodes 1 and 2 to get