rmi timeouts

You can keep a Date as a Global Variable associated with each client in say a Vector of Objects:
Date lastContactCheck = new Date();

Then what you would do is create a simple thread that checks how long it has been since it last updated.
public class CheckThread extends Thread {
   public void run() {
      while (true) {
         Date date = new Date();

         // start looping through Clients and grabbing the lastCheckDate
         if(date.getTime() - lastContactCheck.getTime() > 400000) {
            // notify User or log them out
         }
         // end loop

         try {
              sleep(60000); // sleep for a minute
         }
         catch(InterruptedException ex) {
              // Do something about exception
         }
      }
   }
}

// Then on your server have a method that would actually update the lastCheckDate
public synchronized void updateCheckDate(int client_id) throws Exception {
    // retrieve the object for that client and update it
    lastCheckDate = new java.util.Date();
}

// start the CheckThread on the server when you start the server
CheckThread check = new CheckThread();
check.start();

// Now you need to create a thread for the client to periodically call the method to update the lastCheckDate
public class updateCheckDateThread extends Thread{

    public updateCheckDateThread() {
        super();
    }

    public void run() {
        while (true) {
            try {
                // call updateCheckDate method on server
            } catch (Exception e) {
                // do something with exception
            }

            try {
                sleep(30000); // sleep for 30 seconds or so
            } catch (InterruptedException ex) {
                // do something with the exception
            }
        }
    }
}

// Now just simply start the thread when the client logs in
updateCheckDateThread updatecheck = new updateCheckDateThread();
updatecheck.start()


Basically, what this will do is for each Client that starts it will update the date by calling a method on the server.  if the server doesn't update the date then you have a dead server.  You would just need to set the times that are best for your application

...but if the server is unresponsive, I still have a client, which is consuming a thread, that is stuck waiting for a timeout for an undetermined amount of time.  Isn't there some sort of timeout property for RMI that actually works?

Or you could try something like what they discuss here
http://www.jguru.com/faq/view.jsp?EID=332524

>> when attempting to contact a dead server

If the server is down, connecting would throw an exception.

>>If the server is down, connecting would throw an exception.

In a perfect world, yes.  In reality, no.

>>It depends on your network configuration - if the network time out value is large then it will take some time, but sooner or later it has to throw.

True.  But the time to timeout has been variable in practice.  Up to several hours.  This is a problem for me.

Try the Socket.connect () method overload which takes a timeout parameter:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/net/Socket.html

How do I expose a socket object when calling a remote method on an RMI server?

You can create your own factory:

RMISocketFactory.setSocketFactory ( new RMISocketFactory () {
      public Socket createSocket ( String host, int port ) throws IOException
      {
            Socket socket = new Socket ( host, port ) ;
            socket.setSoTimeout ( timeoutMillis ) ;
            socket.setSoLinger ( false, 0 ) ;
            return socket ;
      }

      public ServerSocket createServerSocket ( int port ) throws IOException
      {
            return new ServerSocket ( port ) ;
      }
} ) ;

Or you can try setting the "sun.rmi.transport.tcp.readTimeout" property.