However, what you should do for sure if you are a proxy server which has already relayed the request to the upstream, is to abort your internal request to the upstream, indicating your lack of interest in the response, which in turn will tell the upstream server to, perhaps, stop an expensive operation.
There are two cases when socket hang up gets thrown:
When you are a client
When you, as a client, send a request to a remote server, and receive no timely response. Your socket is ended which throws this error. You should catch this error and decide how to handle it: whether retry the request, queue it for later, etc.
When you are a server/proxy
When you, as a server, perhaps a proxy server, receive a request from a client, then start acting upon it (or relay the request to the upstream server), and before you have prepared the response, the client decides to cancel/abort the request.
This stack trace shows what happens when a client cancels the request.
Trace: { [Error: socket hang up] code: 'ECONNRESET' }
at ClientRequest.proxyError (your_server_code_error_handler.js:137:15)
at ClientRequest.emit (events.js:117:20)
at Socket.socketCloseListener (http.js:1526:9)
at Socket.emit (events.js:95:17)
at TCP.close (net.js:465:12)
Line http.js:1526:9points to the same socketCloseListener
// This socket error fired before we started to
// receive a response. The error needs to
// fire on the request.
req.emit('error', createHangUpError());
...
function createHangUpError() {
var error = new Error('socket hang up');
error.code = 'ECONNRESET';
return error;
}
This is a typical case if the client is a user in the browser. The request to load some resource/page takes long, and users simply refresh the page. Such action causes the previous request to get aborted which on your server side throws this error.
Since this error is caused by the wish of a client, they don't expect to receive any error message. So, no need to consider this error as critical. Just ignore it. This is encouraged by the fact that on such error the res socket that your client listened to is, though still writable, destroyed.
So, no point to send anything, except explicitly closing the response object:
res.end();