Canceling abandoned requests in ASP.NET Core
Using CancellationToken to be notified of request abandoned by clients
Introduction
When a client makes an HTTP request, the client can abort the request, leaving the server processing if it's not prepared to handle this scenario; wasting its resources that could be used to process other jobs.
In this post, I'll show how to use Cancellation Tokens to cancel running requests that were aborted by clients.
Aborted requests
There are two main scenarios for why requests are aborted by the client:
When loading a page on the browser, a user may click on the stop button to abort the request, or click the refresh button to reload the page.
When a time-out occurs on the client side. A time-out happens when the time that the client is willing to wait for the response expires. When it happens, the client abandons the request and returns and error. It's a good practice to have a time-out configured on the client side when making a request through the network, so it doesn't hang for a long time when the server takes a long time to respond.
Why stop processing abandoned requests on the server?
First, it's a waste of resources. Memory and CPU that could be used to process other requests are used to process a request that was already discarded by the client. This waste of resources extends to dependencies, like databases and APIs that the system consumes.
Second, the abandoned request may slow down other requests, competing for shared resources, like database tables.
🚨 Be careful what requests you cancel. It may not be a good idea to abort a request that makes changes to the state of the system, even if the requests are idempotent, as it can make the state inconsistent. It may be better to let the request finish.
Canceling the requests on ASP.NET Core
1 - Add an CancellationToken
object as a parameter in the Controller method. ASP.NET will provide the object through model binding for us.
[ApiController]
[Route("[controller]")]
public class DogImageController : ControllerBase
{
private readonly IDogImageUseCase _dogImageUseCase;
private readonly ILogger<DogImageController> _logger;
public DogImageController(IDogImageUseCase dogImageUseCase, ILogger<DogImageController> logger)
{
_dogImageUseCase = dogImageUseCase;
_logger = logger;
}
[HttpGet]
public async Task<ActionResult<string>> GetAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
{
try
{
return await _dogImageUseCase.GetRandomDogImage(cancellationToken);
}
catch(TaskCanceledException ex)
{
_logger.LogError(ex, ex.Message);
return StatusCode(StatusCodes.Status500InternalServerError, "Request timed out or cancelled");
}
}
}
2 - Pass the CancellationToken
down to all async methods in your code.
public class DogImageUseCase: IDogImageUseCase
{
private readonly IDogApi _dogApi;
public DogImageUseCase(IDogApi dogApi)
{
_dogApi = dogApi;
}
public async Task<string> GetRandomDogImage(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
{
var dog = await _dogApi.GetRandomDog(cancellationToken);
return dog.message;
}
}
3 - The CancellationToken will throw an TaskCanceledException
when the request is aborted. It's important to log this error to measure how much it is happening.
CancellationToken with Refit
Refit is a .NET library that facilitates consuming REST APIs. It generates a typed client based on an interface. More details here.
To pass a CancellationToken
to a Refit client as in the example above, just insert a CancellationToken
parameter in the interface:
public interface IDogApi
{
[Get("/breeds/image/random")]
Task<Dog> GetRandomDog(CancellationToken cancellationToken);
}
⚠️ By convention, the
CancellationToken
should be the last parameter in the method. There is even a static analyzer for this rule (CA1068: CancellationToken parameters must come last). More on static analyzers in this post.
Testing the solution
We can manually test if the solution works by inserting a delay in our code and making a request through the browser to the /DogImage
route.
1 - Insert a 2 minute delay so we have time to stop the request on the client side. It's required to also pass the CancellationToken
to the Delay
method so it can exit on a request cancellation:
public class DogImageUseCase: IDogImageUseCase
{
private readonly IDogApi _dogApi;
public DogImageUseCase(IDogApi dogApi)
{
_dogApi = dogApi;
}
public async Task<string> GetRandomDogImage(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
{
var dog = await _dogApi.GetRandomDog(cancellationToken);
await Task.Delay(TimeSpan.FromMinutes(2), cancellationToken);
return dog.message;
}
}
2 - Insert a breakpoint inside the catch TaskCanceledException
block;
3 - Run the application and open the route URL in the browser (in this example, /DogImage
);
4 - Hit the browser's stop button or press the esc
key.
We will hit the breakpoint, confirming the solution is working.
Problems with this solution
AWS API Gateway has a time-out but it does not report the time-out event to the underlying AWS lambda function. If a time-out occurs at the API Gateway, the users will receive a time-out error but the metrics and logs won't show those errors, making it seem like no problems are happening.
Some HTTP Client libraries (for example, Python
requests
and Gonet/http
) don't have a default timeout, if the consumer doesn't set one, it will wait indefinitely for the server response. This may leave the server processing for a long time in case of a bug, for example.
In the next post, I'll explain a complementary solution that mitigates the problems above.
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