I have an iOS app which is using ASIHTTPRequest to talk to a REST server. The server supports connections on port 80 (HTTP) and port 443 (HTTPS) – I’m using a GeoTrust/RapidSSL certificate on port 443. The user can configure the app to choose what protocol they want to use. I’m monitoring the traffic on the server using WireShark and what I’m finding is that occasionally if the user switches between HTTP and HTTPS, when they next submit a request then I can see traffic for both protocols, then every request after that is for the newly selected protocol only.
Also when the app is shutdown, there are a few packets sent which I guess is some kind of cleanup. The type of these final packets (HTTP/HTTPS) depends on what protocol the app has been using. If the app has been set to use both HTTP and HTTPS during the same app session, then both HTTP and HTTPS packets are sent when the app is shutdown. These scenarios don’t seem right to me and suggest that my ASIHTTPRequest is not being completely cleared down. I am getting an occasional error when my request completes with the response ‘HTTP/0.9 200 OK’ but doesn’t return any data and I think this is caused by trying to communicate with port 443 using HTTP.
Can anybody confirm my suspicions are true? Is there some command I should be using after an ASIHTTPRequest to clear it down so the next request can be sent on a different protocol?
What you are seeing is sounds like what HTTP persistent connections are meant to do; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_persistent_connection and so on.
There’s nothing you need to do, none of this is doing any harm. The few http packets you see when switching protocols is just the old socket getting closed down I believe – I presume you are just seeing packets to TCP port 80, and aren’t seeing any packets with data / actual http requests.