Setting a longer timeout for Net::HTTP Requests in Ruby

In order to exercise a RESTful web service I've been working on, I wrote a quick Ruby script to hammer the service with large update requests. After uncovering and fixing a handful of concurrency issues in the server, I started seeing timeout errors in my test script when I sent numerous simultaneous updates. The errors look like:

/opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/timeout.rb:54:in `rbuf_fill': execution expired (Timeout::Error)
    from /opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/timeout.rb:56:in `timeout'
    from /opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/timeout.rb:76:in `timeout'
    from /opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/net/protocol.rb:132:in `rbuf_fill'
    from /opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/net/protocol.rb:116:in `readuntil'
    from /opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/net/protocol.rb:126:in `readline'
    from /opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:2017:in `read_status_line'
    from /opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:2006:in `read_new'
    from /opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:1047:in `request'
    from /opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:1034:in `request'
    from /opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:543:in `start'
    from /opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:1032:in `request'
    from /opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:842:in `post'
    from ./rndsender.rb:21:in `post_update'
    from ./rndsender.rb:76:in `main'
    from ./rndsender.rb:80

Adding a rescue as shown below allows you to handle the timeout error:

def post_update(path, payload)
  http = Net::HTTP.new(@host, @port)
  res = http.post(path, payload, {'Content-Type' =>; 'application/xml'})
  case res
  when Net::HTTPSuccess
    puts "update posted"
  else
    res.error!
  end
  rescue Timeout::Error =>; e
    puts "update timeout error"
end

After searching a bit on the web, I came across this post that had the magic incantation for adjusting the timeout in the Net::HTTP API. Here it is:

http = Net::HTTP.new(@host, @port)
http.read_timeout = 500

And in case you are interested in actually making use of the timeout, be warned! Read this in which you will learn that

Ruby's Thread#raise, Thread#kill, and the timeout.rb standard library based on them are inherently broken and should not be used for any purpose. And by extension, net/protocol.rb and all the net/* libraries that use timeout.rb are also currently broken (but they can be fixed).

Technorati Tags: programming, Ruby

archived on 2008-04-13 in null

Setting a longer timeout for Net::HTTP Requests in Ruby

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