Hacker NewsMonday · May 18, 2026FREE

The occasional ECONNRESET

The article, published on movq.de, details the author's investigation into an intermittent ECONNRESET error occurring in a Node.js HTTP server. The error appeared sporadically under load, making it difficult to reproduce. Through debugging, the author identified a race condition in Node.js's `http` module where a socket could be destroyed while the server was still trying to write to it, leading to the ECONNRESET. The root cause was that the 'close' event was emitted before the socket was fully closed, causing the server to attempt to reuse the socket. The fix involved modifying the server's connection handling to ensure the socket is properly closed and removed from the connection pool before emitting the 'close' event. The author provides a patch and discusses the implications for Node.js applications handling persistent connections.