Major Description
In production, we have noticed that the metastore server tends to accumulate half-open TCP connections when it has been running for a long time. By half-open, I am referring to idle connections where there is an established TCP connection on the metastore server machine, but no corresponding connection on the client machine. This could be the result of network disconnects or crashed clients.
This patch will add an option to turn on TCP keepalive so that these half-open connections will get cleaned up.