Worker does not timeout when connection to server is interrupted

[bwlewis]

Consider two computers, hostnames A and B and assume Redis is running on computer A.
Start a manual doRedis R worker on computer B:

library(doRedis)
redisWorker(queue="test", host="A")

then log in to computer A and block the redis port, where eth0 is the network interface linking the two machines:

sudo  iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -i eth0 --dport 6379 -j DROP

Note that computer B hangs indefinitely even though its connection to Redis was severed. I didn't expect this, because the R connection timeout is set low intentionally in the worker.

It turns out that if the connection is restored, computer B will eventually fail, at least on my test rig, for instance log in to computer A and run:

sudo  iptables -F

Timing out and failing after the connection is restored is good behavior, but I wonder if this can be improved?