I\'m running a Twisted server with the LineReceiver protocol. Sometimes clients will disconnect silently, so Twisted keeps the connection open. And because the server doesn\'t
You can schedule timed events using reactor.callLater. Based on this, there's a helper for adding timeouts to protocols, twisted.protocols.policies.TimeoutMixin.
Another approach is to use TCP keep-alives, which you can enable using the transport's setTcpKeepAlive method.
And another approach is to use application-level keep-alives. Essentially send a ''noop'' once in a while. It doesn't need a response. If the connection has been lost, the extra data in the send buffer will cause the TCP stack to eventually notice.
See also the FAQ entry.