What happens when I call URLSessionTask's task.cancel()?

Question

The reference for this method only says what happens locally on the client, and says nothing about what it potentially sends to the server. Apparently, our server has some challenges with receiving a lot of status code 499 from us when we cancel a request, but I can't find anything about how URLSession handles cancellation. Is there a standard cancel-message over the protocol HTTP?

Answer 1

The client doesn’t send 499. Status codes are one-way. Rather, the client closes the network connection. The server records that dropped connection as a 499 status code in its logs.

If the server is HTTP/2 or later, the client may send either a END_STREAM or RST_STREAM message to cancel a single request without canceling other requests on the same connection, or it may just drop the connection. Either way, you’ll probably just see a 499 in your logs. There is little reason to care whether the connection was dropped or cancelled.