ECONNRESET due to upstream timeout causes crash

[ImranR-TI]

Environment

Node 22.14.0, httpxy 0.1.7

Reproduction

https://github.com/ImranR-TI/httpxy_econnreset_minimal

1. Install HAProxy and use the haproxy.cfg provided.
2. Run node proxy.js
3. Install wscat and run: wscat -c http://localhost:80/socket

It eventually crashes with this error: error: Unexpected server response: 502

Proxy logs:

Proxy server listening on port 8000
node:events:496
      throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
      ^

Error: read ECONNRESET
    at TCP.onStreamRead (node:internal/stream_base_commons:216:20)
Emitted 'error' event on Socket instance at:
    at emitErrorNT (node:internal/streams/destroy:170:8)
    at emitErrorCloseNT (node:internal/streams/destroy:129:3)
    at process.processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:90:21) {
  errno: -104,
  code: 'ECONNRESET',
  syscall: 'read'
}

Node.js v22.14.0

Describe the bug

I'm seeing the httpxy crash with ECONNRESET in a specific scenario (minimal reproducible example above).

Basically I have the following setup: [client] --> [HAProxy] --> [Node proxy] --> [backend]

1. A backend socket server
2. A Node proxy server powered by httpxy
   • This has some conditional logic which ensures that only specific requests are forwarded to the backend - the rest are simply ignored (no response). So clients are left waiting forever.
3. A second proxy (HAProxy) in front of the Node proxy, that has some default request timeout value
   • This ensures that requests left waiting forever for some response (that will never come) do eventually have to break the connection.
   • I'm using HAProxy but I think anything similar would work here.

The bug I'm seeing has to do with this external timeout - it causes the Node proxy to crash with ECONNRESET. The error itself is not a problem, we would expect to see an error in this kind of situation. The problem is that the error crashes the entire process despite the presence of a proxy.on('error') listener.

I know this is a weird use case (my code should ideally respond to "ignored" requests with a 404 or something instead of completely ignoring them) but it does still expose what I think is a bug.

Minimal code to reproduce the bug is in the repo linked above.

Note backend.js has been omitted since it doesn't really matter in this case whether or not a backend exists - we never proxy the request anyways.

Thanks for this rewrite BTW, the old one had a bad memory leak (among other issues).

Additional context

No response

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