Erlang. Asynchronous http request. How to know when connection is broken?

Question

Making an asynchronous request to some server using the httpc HTTP client

httpc:request(get, {Url, []}, [], [{sync, false}, {stream,
self}])

where Url is the URL of the server. Data is received by handle_info/2 in gen_server that called httpc:request/4 but I should get message when the connection is broken and there is no stream_end message. Using timeout is not feasible for me, because server response can take a long time.

Is it possible to get message about a broken connection in handle_info/2? If not, please suggest way to know when the connection is broken?

Answer 1

For more heavy-duty lifting of HTTP requests, use ibrowse:

https://github.com/cmullaparthi/ibrowse

It has many more knobs to twist and turn for requests and is more complete w.r.t. many things. If http/httpc doesn't solve your problem, it is worth investigating if going to ibrowse will.