java.net.SocketException: Connection reset

I am getting the following error trying to read from a socket. I'm doing a readInt() on that InputStream, and I am getting this error. Perusing the documentation this suggests that the client part of the connection closed the connection. In this scenario, I am the server.

I have access to the client log files and it is not closing the connection, and in fact its log files suggest I am closing the connection. So does anybody have an idea why this is happening? What else to check for? Does this arise when there are local resources that are perhaps reaching thresholds?

I do note that I have the following line:

socket.setSoTimeout(10000);

just prior to the readInt(). There is a reason for this (long story), but just curious, are there circumstances under which this might lead to the indicated error? I have the server running in my IDE, and I happened to leave my IDE stuck on a breakpoint, and I then noticed the exact same errors begin appearing in my own logs in my IDE.

Anyway, just mentioning it, hopefully not a red herring. :-(

Solution 1:

There are several possible causes.

1. The other end has deliberately reset the connection, in a way which I will not document here. It is rare, and generally incorrect, for application software to do this, but it is not unknown for commercial software.

2. More commonly, it is caused by writing to a connection that the other end has already closed normally. In other words an application protocol error.

3. It can also be caused by closing a socket when there is unread data in the socket receive buffer.

4. In Windows, 'software caused connection abort', which is not the same as 'connection reset', is caused by network problems sending from your end. There's a Microsoft knowledge base article about this.

Solution 2:

Connection reset simply means that a TCP RST was received. This happens when your peer receives data that it can't process, and there can be various reasons for that.

The simplest is when you close the socket, and then write more data on the output stream. By closing the socket, you told your peer that you are done talking, and it can forget about your connection. When you send more data on that stream anyway, the peer rejects it with an RST to let you know it isn't listening.

In other cases, an intervening firewall or even the remote host itself might "forget" about your TCP connection. This could happen if you don't send any data for a long time (2 hours is a common time-out), or because the peer was rebooted and lost its information about active connections. Sending data on one of these defunct connections will cause a RST too.

Update in response to additional information:

Take a close look at your handling of the SocketTimeoutException. This exception is raised if the configured timeout is exceeded while blocked on a socket operation. The state of the socket itself is not changed when this exception is thrown, but if your exception handler closes the socket, and then tries to write to it, you'll be in a connection reset condition. setSoTimeout() is meant to give you a clean way to break out of a read() operation that might otherwise block forever, without doing dirty things like closing the socket from another thread.