You can use the standard socket on the req
object, and manually call setTimeout to increase the time before node hangs up the socket. By default, node has a 2 minute timer on all sockets for inactivity, which is why you are getting hang ups at exactly 120s (this has nothing to do with restify). As an example of increasing that, set up a handler to run before your long running task like this:
server.use(function (req, res, next) {
// This will set the idle timer to 10 minutes
req.connection.setTimeout(600 * 1000);
res.connection.setTimeout(600 * 1000); //**Edited**
next();
});