What about closing streams in the pipe on error?

[thomas-riccardi]

https://www.npmjs.com/package/pump has similar features to multipipe, but also handles closing streams in the pipe on error.
It seems to be a nice feature for multipipe.

The issue being that destroy is not part of the Stream2/3 official API, but it's still useful for streams that support this.

Are there plans to add this to multipipe? pump has less tests than multipipe, and 2 times less downloads per months on npmjs.org

[juliangruber]

streams are already being closed, it's just that .destroy isn't being called. is that what you refer to?

[thomas-riccardi]

From the pump readme:

When using standard source.pipe(dest) source will not be destroyed if dest emits close or an error. `

The flow stops, but the streams are still alive. It leaks memory, and sometimes more:

fs.createReadStream('/a/file').pipe(res) in a http server request handler: if res.socket is abruptly closed by the http client, then the fs ReadStream will not be closed because pipe doesn't do that per its spec.
This means the server is leaking file descriptors.
Cf nodejs/node#1834

pump helps by assuming destroy is pseudo-standard (and some other hacks like recognizing node-request objects which have another method for destroy (we as the community should try to converge to destroy, and add it to nodejs spec...))

[juliangruber]

ok i agree this is a good idea to add. can you contribute some of your time to get this rolling?

[thomas-riccardi]

Sorry I don't have time to do that for now...
In the meantime I use pump.

Maybe both could merge!

This new feature could be considered a breaking feature, this would require major version 2 if enabled by default (and it should be enabled by default: it's really useful).