[Solved]-How do I terminate a long-running Django request if the XHR gets an abort()?

Due to how http works and that you usually got a frontend in front of your django gunicorn app processes (or uswgi etc), your http cancel request is buffered by nginx. The gunicorns don’t get a signal, they just finish processing and then output whatever to the http socket. But if that socket is closed it will have an error (which is caught as a closed connection and move one).

So it’s easy to DOS a server if you can find a way to spawn many of these requests.

But to answer your question it depends on the backend, with gunicorn it will keep going until the timeout.

Just think of the Web as a platform for building easy-to-use, distributed, loosely couple systems, with no guarantee about the availability of resources as 404 status code suggests.

I think that creating tightly coupled solutions such as your idea is going against web principles and usage of REST. xhr.abort() is client side programming, it’s completely different from server side. It’s a bad practice trying to tighten client side technology to server side internal behavior.

Not only this is a waste of resources, but also there is no guarantee on processing status of the request by web server. It may lead to data inconsistency too.

If your request generates no server-side side effects for which the client
can be held responsible. It is better just to ignore it, since these kind of requests does not change server state & the response is usually cached for better performance.

If your request could cause changes in server state or data, for the sake of data consistency you can check whether the changes have taken effect or not using an API. In case of affection try to rollback using another API.