I wrote a simple server using socket API in C under linux which listens at port 80 on localhost. Now when I send a request from the browser google chrome to the program it receives 2 requests while it receives only one when I send from firefox.
The URL I typed in the browser was: http://localhost/xyz.html
OUTPUT WHEN I TYPE URL IN CHROME
root@anirudh-Aspire-5920:/home/anirudh/workspace/DCMTOL# ./DCMTOL_RUN
Inside HTTP server Handler
Inside HTTP request Handler
**Detected request: clientsocket_fd = 6 clientportnumber = 38027**
GET /xyz.html HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Accept:application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/8.0.552.224 Safari/534.10
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Inside HTTP request Handler
**Detected request: clientsocket_fd = 7 clientportnumber = 38029**
^C
root@anirudh-Aspire-5920:/home/anirudh/workspace/DCMTOL#
the second request does not send any data so my code waits at the read call and so I have to terminate it ‘^C’.
OUTPUT WHEN I TYPE URL IN FIREFOX
root@anirudh-Aspire-5920:/home/anirudh/workspace/DCMTOL# ./DCMTOL_RUN
Inside HTTP server Handler
Inside HTTP request Handler
**Detected request: clientsocket_fd = 6 clientportnumber = 45567**
GET /xyz.html HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101206 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.13
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
^C
root@anirudh-Aspire-5920:/home/anirudh/workspace/DCMTOL#
Question: How can chrome browser send 2 requests (one being empty) when I typed the URL only once. As you can see above I detected 2 requests. I tried to do netstat in the case of sending URL from chrome and I found that both of the request were sent by the browser only. and as u can see above when I send the URL from firefox only 1 request is received.
Here is the output of net stat when I send request from chrome
Active Internet connections (w/o servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State PID/Program name
tcp 0 0 117.195.110.186:48701 74.125.77.102:80 TIME_WAIT -
tcp 0 0 117.195.110.186:48700 74.125.77.102:80 ESTABLISHED 5699/google-chrome
tcp 0 0 117.195.110.186:55815 209.85.175.138:80 ESTABLISHED 5699/google-chrome
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:80 127.0.0.1:38029 ESTABLISHED -
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:38029 127.0.0.1:80 ESTABLISHED 5699/google-chrome
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:38027 127.0.0.1:80 ESTABLISHED 5699/google-chrome
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:80 127.0.0.1:38027 ESTABLISHED -
tcp 0 0 117.195.110.186:35402 74.125.153.125:5222 ESTABLISHED 4430/pidgin
thanks in advance 🙂
I had a similar issue with my node server. It is due to the following bug in Chrome. In summary, Chrome is sending a request for a favicon on every request. As, is likely, you aren’t sending a favicon back, it requests one after every legitimate request.
Firefox, and most other browsers, also send out a request for a favicon when they first connect, but cache the result i.e. if there isn’t a favicon returned first time, they don’t keep trying – which is why you’re only seeing a single request from Firefox. It seems Chrome is unfortunately a little too persistent with its favicon requestiness.