Extensive functionality is provided in service calls to allow Clients to control the lifetime of continuation points and their associated operations. Clients can explicitly release old continuation points if required.

Section 7.6 states that continuation points from previous service calls shall be automatically released when a new request requires a continuation point and none are available. This can result in strange behaviour in certain instances.

For example, with History Read the "Historical Raw Data Server Facet" mandates that enough continuation points must be available to cover the MaxNodesPerHistoryReadData Server OperationLimits Property. If a server supports this facet and shall automatically release continuation points from previous calls then the case of continuation points being unavailable never arises and the server will never return an operation level result of BadNoContinuationPoints.

Is it desirable that a server should silently release continuation points on a Client without the Client requesting the release? There is no attack vector here as continuation points are effectively supported per session so there should be no interactions between sessions. If the Client forgets to release a continuation point it will be released when the session is closed in any case.

If the WG is happy with the current specification that is fine but to me it would be preferable if the server allowed the Client to decide if and when to release continuation points.