Concerns when connecting mobile clients to DataPower through HTTP(S)

A common use case is to secure web services for mobile clients by using DataPower to proxy HTTPS from mobile clients. This has some challenges.

 

Here is one: By default the idle client timeouts for most services are 2 minutes. Of course for a mobile client that is almost always much too long. Would you wait 2 minutes on your phone for a app to respond or a web page to download?

 

By itself though, this would not be an issue. However, unlike fixed clients, mobile clients can often drop off the network, for example as they switch towers. This can cause lots of hanging connections on DataPower as it waits for the FSH client idle timeout to expire. Per the specifications, DataPower can't know if the client has gone away. This can tie up a fair bit of memory. If you recall some of my previous posts about memory, you know that DataPower will hold onto memory until the transaction completes.

 

So it is recommended when hosting mobile client to drastically reduce the timeouts, both front and back. Note that you should reduce the idle timeouts, not the persistent timeouts.

 

 

title image (modified) credit: (cc) Some rights reserved by bnsonger47

 

Tags:  timeouts mobile timeout datapower https websphere