Documentation of TCP possible errors / unpredictable behaviours

I've started some time ago to work with custom-made servers, and even though I have experience to deal with the actual message exchange / serialization, etc, of client/server communications, I've had never coded an actual server from scratch. In this sense, I have found raw TCP socket connections to be much trickier and unpredictable than I'd like.

For example, I coded a simple client/server application that would establish a long lived TCP connection, and the clients would receive push notifications from 开发者_Python百科the server. Very simple, it worked very well in my test environment, even with many computers.

When I actually published this, though, I've had got lots of errors that later I would found that it was the lack of keepalive signals, which would make the connection to be cut, without giving me (either client or server) any feedback / error at all. The messages simply wouldn't be delivered, and fail silently.

I knew that TCP could break the connection, but I thought I could at least receive an error or such so I could reconnect in case of loss of connection. This made me very insecure about rolling my own servers, as the possible errors and scenarios seem too many and unexpected, and I really don't want to learn about the unexpected behaviours when the actual application is deployed. With my current experience with server-side programming, the best way to deal with errors would be to enumerate all possible errors, and make sure I cover all exceptional cases when writing a program.

So, is there anywhere I could find a good documentation on the possible pitfalls / exceptions I could find with sockets, with how to detect them? It's been some time since I last worked with that, so I don't have any more fresh examples, but I remember that e.g. when you receive an empty message it would mean that the connection broke.

I'd also love to hear suggestions, or maybe simple libs (preferrably in C) that cover them so I can base my work in it? My main platform is linux, but a cross-platform solution is much appreciated!

Thank you!