Timeout on a HTTP request in python

Question

Very occasionally when making a http request, I am waiting for an age for a response that never comes. What is the recommended way to cancel this request after a reasonable period of time?

Answer 1

Set the HTTP request timeout.

Answer 2

The timeout parameter to urllib2.urlopen, or httplib. The original urllib has no such convenient feature. You can also use an asynchronous HTTP client such as twisted.web.client, but that's probably not necessary.

Answer 3

If you are making a lot of HTTP requests, you can change this globally by calling socket.setdefaulttimeout