Mosh improvement

The mobile shell mosh is very convenient substitute to the traditional ssh. I have now test used it in Linux and Android (JuiceSSH) for a couple of weeks. There is one issue that I have noticed. If the client process dies while connection is broken - most common scenario that you run out of battery - the server process does not receive any notification and remains running forever, or until manually killed or system boots. Even if old mosh-servers are running, new mosh sessions will start new server processes at server side every time.

I have now number of such mosh-server processes idling for more than a week. Of course I can terminate them manually, but that is not a generic solution. Consider a general purpose server with hundreds or thousands of users, like a university terminal server. Then you may start getting troubles with all the mosh servers doing nothing but consume memory.

I have recognized two possible solution alternatives. First is the dirty one, implement a timeout at server side that will terminate the server after certain idle period. That's against the philosophy of mosh and SSP, but if you make it user configurable, as a command line argument for example, then it's possibly not such a big crime.

Second solution is more sophisticated, by enabling recovery of existing connection by a new client session. This approach requires security credentials of the session to be stored locally at the client side.  Management of old and new sessions might then cause headache, and I understand that the development team of the mosh didn't chosen this solution. After all, originally it was just a research project at MIT.

I'd accept the timeout approach. The old good screen program takes care of maintaining my persistent session at server, thus I don't see a problem starting a new mosh session after 48 or 96 hours of communication break. I'd would be easy to implement, and would not compromise the security architecture by any way.