Asp.net Web API self host service unhandled exception when client drops connection

Question

I'm using web api self host inside a windows service and I've encountered a problem and after googling for couple of hours haven't found a reasonable answer.

One of the api controllers serves large stream of data (not really that large, couple of tens of MB). It takes some time to produce data so I've decided to use TransferMode.StreamedResponse to minimize the time client has to wait for response. I've also added a CompressHandler and custom CompressedContent (derived from HttpContent) mostly based on a following answer.

The controller returns an instance of IDataReader, which is then serialized by custom formatter which is lastly compressed inside CompressedContent that I've mentioned. The whole data passing is streamed so while the client receives data, a data reader on server side may still be reading rows from database. Everything works fine when client is acting nicely.

The problem occurs when a client drops connection while the data is still being serialized to the underlying network stream. I've tried to watch for IsFaulted task inside of ContinueWith delegate (in CompressedContent from the link) and dispose underlying network Stream. Unfortunately the CommunicationException (The specified network name is no longer available) is still being thrown when the control leaves my code. From the stacktrace it looks like the exception is thrown when the Web Api tries to close (end) the underlying network stream (http channel?). As it happens with unobserved exceptions it brings entire windows service down.

I've mitigated the problem by setting windows service recovery options but I would like to know if this failure can be handled in code.

Is there a way to setup a custom error handler (IErrorHandler presumably) inside web api self hosting service mode to prevent this kind of error?

I'm using Beta version, I will try to reproduce this error on RC but I somehow doubt that setting up this kind of error handler would change in any way

Answer 1

We had the same issue. I was able to submit a fix to MS and they have in turn released a nightly build that fixes this. They are looking at back porting the fix to the RTM. You can see the pull release here: http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/SourceControl/network/forks/rdean79/issue284/contribution/3329