This is the Internet equivalent of keeping phone scammers on the line by not just refusing to hang up, but actively interacting with them until they hang up (search YouTube for "tech support scammer trolling" for some entertainment...)
That said, I'm a little confused even after reading the linked RFC paragraph; it claims "The primary use of this feature is to allow TCP-wrappers to display an error message before disconnecting." but I'm not familiar with that term and there are no other occurrences of the word "wrapper" in that document.
Firefox and Chrome will spin on that server for hours before giving up.
For a web browser, this behaviour makes a lot of sense: timeouts are usually based on "I've waited for X and haven't received anything", not "this connection is like collecting water from a dripping tap". As long as there is a slow but steady stream of content coming in, you wouldn't want to abort until the user gives up or an internal limit on the data collected is hit (which is probably what happened with the author's tests --- a quick search doesn't yield the maximum size of the response headers browsers will accept, but servers usually have a configurable limit of a few KB at most for the request headers alone.)
That said, I'm a little confused even after reading the linked RFC paragraph; it claims "The primary use of this feature is to allow TCP-wrappers to display an error message before disconnecting." but I'm not familiar with that term and there are no other occurrences of the word "wrapper" in that document.
Firefox and Chrome will spin on that server for hours before giving up.
For a web browser, this behaviour makes a lot of sense: timeouts are usually based on "I've waited for X and haven't received anything", not "this connection is like collecting water from a dripping tap". As long as there is a slow but steady stream of content coming in, you wouldn't want to abort until the user gives up or an internal limit on the data collected is hit (which is probably what happened with the author's tests --- a quick search doesn't yield the maximum size of the response headers browsers will accept, but servers usually have a configurable limit of a few KB at most for the request headers alone.)