I'm using beanstalkd to offload some work to other machines. The setup is a bit unusual, the server is on the internet (public ip) but the consumers are behind adsl lines on some peoples homes. So there is a linux server as client going out through a dynamic ip and connecting to the server to get a job. It's all PHP and I'm using pheanstalk library.

Everything runs smoothly for some time, but then the adsl changes the IP (every 24h hours the provider forces a disconnect-reconnect) the client just hangs, never to go out of "reserve".

I thought that putting a timeout on the reserve would help it, but it didn't. As it seems, the client issues a command and blocks, it never checks the timeout. It just issues a reserve-with-timeout (instead of a simple reserve) and it is the servers responsibility to return a TIME_OUT as the timeout occurs. The problem is, the connection is broken (but the TCP/IP doesn't know about that yet until any of the sides try to talk to the other side) and if the client blocked reading, it will never return.

The library seems to have support for some kind of timeouts locally (for example when trying to connect to server), but it does not seem to contemplate this scenario.

How could I detect the stale connection and force a reconnect? Is there some kind of keepalive on the protocol (and on the pheanstalk itself)?

Thanks!