LWP::UserAgent request ignores timeout when internal server error encountered

[Anonymous Monk]

This took just over 3 minutes (default timeout). Why didn't the timeout of 10 seconds kick in?

Note I cannot reproduce as the internal server error is fixed, but I want to avoid the lengthy timeout in future

Using perl 5.8.0, here is code snippet:

  my $method = 'POST';
  my $url = "https://etc"; # note: actual url not shown here
  my $query_string = "";   # note: actual query string not shown here

  my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
  $ua->timeout(10);
  $ua->agent('Mozilla/4.6');
  $ua->cookie_jar(HTTP::Cookies->new);
  $request = new HTTP::Request($method,$url);
  $request->content_type('application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
  $request->content($query_string);

  $response_content =  $ua->request($request)->content;
  LWP::Debug::debug("Response:\n$response_content\n");

Debug messages are as follows:

LWP::UserAgent::new: ()
LWP::UserAgent::proxy:  
LWP::UserAgent::request: ()
LWP::UserAgent::send_request: POST <URL here>
LWP::UserAgent::_need_proxy: Not proxied
LWP::Protocol::http::request: ()
LWP::UserAgent::request: Simple response: Internal Server Error
Response:
500 Connect failed: connect: Connection timed out; Connection timed ou
+t

[thanos1983]

Hello Anonymous Monk,

Have a look on this previously similar answered question Hard timeout for LWP::UserAgent or similar, as it contains several different approaches to your problem.

Update: I just wrote a very small sample of code that it looks like timeout is working. I do not know why it is not working for you.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP::UserAgent ();
use Time::HiRes qw[ time ];

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->timeout(1);
my $uri = "http://192.168.1.31/noexist.html";
print time . "\n";
my $response = $ua->post($uri);
print time . "\n";

if ($response->is_success) {
    print $response->decoded_content;  # or whatever
}
else {
    die $response->status_line;
}

__END__

$ perl test.pl
1534257027.70495
1534257028.72877
500 Can't connect to 192.168.1.31:80 (Connection timed out) at test.pl
+ line 18.

Hope this helps, BR.

[Anonymous Monk]

Further investigation shows that timeout works for http but not for https

Does this throw any further light on it?

[hippo]

Counter-example as SSCCE:

use strict;
use warnings;

use LWP::UserAgent;
use Test::More tests => 1;

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new ();
$ua->timeout (5);
my $start = time;
my $res = $ua->get ('https://www.sco.com:666/');
my $duration = time - $start;
cmp_ok ($duration, '<', 10, 'Short timeout triggered');

[sectokia]

Are you really running perl 5.8? What version of libwww-perl are you running?