[ale] apache/tomcat: HTTP behavior after RST

[Jerry Yu]

On an application server (Apache 2.0 + Tomcat 5) on CentOS 4.1, it takes 5
minutes before tomcat spits back a long query results to the web server and
to the client in turn. The  communication is proxyed by a load balancer. ~3
minutes after the HTTP request was ACKed by the server, the load balancer
sends a RST packet to both the client and the web server due to timeout. The
reset is expected and is good. However, Apache continued to wait and
eventually got the response from Tomcat, as evidenced by entry in
access.log(statusCode=200 & 2m after the RST).

Two questions here:

   - What is the correct behavior for a HTTP server when the client reset
   the TCP connection through which the HTTP request gets sent in?
   - should one attempt to avoid duplicated transactions on the
   application end, or elsewhere? The client didn't see the results while the
   transaction obviously went through.
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