Daniel McAllansmith wrote:

I'm having some problems with connections leaking when using 7.4.  I've just checked and it happens with 7.5 off of hackage as well.

It appears that readDocument doesn't close the connection when using the haskell http library, it works ok when curl is used though.

Following is a program which demonstrates the problem.  /tmp/list.txt just has the name of files available from my local webserver, more than 1024 files is enough to exhaust my open file limit.

I think the garbage collector does collect the connections, but they don't end up fully closed... that's another issue I'm planning on looking at.

If you need any more information please ask.  I may get a chance to try and write a patch but using curl is a work around while I'm busy. ....

this is a known problem with HTTP package (version 3001.0.4). Paul Brown has described this somewere in his blog. (http://mult.ifario.us/t/haskell), but my firefox only shows an incomplete page of this blog, the solution is missing. Paul promissed in his blog to send a patch to Björn Bringert. Here is the solution: edit the close function in HTTP/TCP.hs as follows: ---------------------------------------------------------------- close ref = do { c <- readIORef (getRef ref) ; closeConn c ; writeIORef (getRef ref) ConnClosed } where -- Be kind to peer & close gracefully. closeConn (ConnClosed) = return () closeConn (MkConn sk addr [] _) = mapM_ (flip Exception.catch $ \_ -> return ()) [ shutdown sk ShutdownSend , suck ref , shutdown sk ShutdownReceive , sClose sk ] suck :: Connection -> IO () suck cn = readLine cn >>= either (\_ -> return ()) -- catch errors & ignore (\x -> if null x then return () else suck cn) --------------------------------------------------------------------- I hope this will help. Cheers Uwe P.S. to Björn: It would be nice, if you could include this change into the HTTP module and upload a new version to hackage.