zeromq: reset REQ/REP socket state

The good news is that, as of ZMQ 3.0 and later (the modern era), you can set a timeout on a socket. As others have noted elsewhere, you must do this after you have created the socket, but before you connect it:

zmq_req_socket.setsockopt( zmq.RCVTIMEO, 500 ) # milliseconds

Then, when you actually try to receive the reply (after you have sent a message to the REP socket), you can catch the error that will be asserted if the timeout is exceeded:

 try:
   send( message, 0 )
   send_failed = False

 except zmq.Again:
   logging.warning( "Image send failed." )
   send_failed = True

However! When this happens, as observed elsewhere, your socket will be in a funny state, because it will still be expecting the response. At this point, I cannot find anything that works reliably other than just restarting the socket. Note that if you disconnect() the socket and then re connect() it, it will still be in this bad state. Thus you need to

def reset_my_socket:
  zmq_req_socket.close()
  zmq_req_socket = zmq_context.socket( zmq.REQ )
  zmq_req_socket.setsockopt( zmq.RCVTIMEO, 500 ) # milliseconds
  zmq_req_socket.connect( zmq_endpoint )

You will also notice that because I close()d the socket, the receive timeout option was "lost", so it is important set that on the new socket.

I hope this helps. And I hope that this does not turn out to be the best answer to this question. :)

There is one solution to this and that is adding timeouts to all calls. Since ZeroMQ by itself does not really provide simple timeout functionality I recommend using a subclass of the ZeroMQ socket that adds a timeout parameter to all important calls.

So, instead of calling s.recv() you would call s.recv(timeout=5.0) and if a response does not come back within that 5 second window it will return None and stop blocking. I had made a futile attempt at this when I run into this problem.

As the accepted answer seem so terribly sad to me, I did some research and have found that everything we need was actually in the documentation.

The .setsockopt() with the correct parameter can help you resetting your socket state-machine without brutally destroy it and rebuild another on top of the previous one dead body.

(yeah I like the image).

ZMQ_REQ_CORRELATE: match replies with requests
The default behaviour of REQ sockets is to rely on the ordering of messages to match requests and responses and that is usually sufficient. When this option is set to 1, the REQ socket will prefix outgoing messages with an extra frame containing a request id. That means the full message is (request id, 0, user frames…). The REQ socket will discard all incoming messages that don't begin with these two frames.
Option value type int
Option value unit 0, 1
Default value 0
Applicable socket types ZMQ_REQ

ZMQ_REQ_RELAXED: relax strict alternation between request and reply
By default, a REQ socket does not allow initiating a new request with zmq_send(3) until the reply to the previous one has been received. When set to 1, sending another message is allowed and has the effect of disconnecting the underlying connection to the peer from which the reply was expected, triggering a reconnection attempt on transports that support it. The request-reply state machine is reset and a new request is sent to the next available peer.
If set to 1, also enable ZMQ_REQ_CORRELATE to ensure correct matching of requests and replies. Otherwise a late reply to an aborted request can be reported as the reply to the superseding request.
Option value type int
Option value unit 0, 1
Default value 0
Applicable socket types ZMQ_REQ

A complete documentation is here