Disable Chrome Auto Reload on Time Out Error

Question

I'm a web developer, and often run scripts to fix things that might time out due to server or browser settings. In the past, Chrome would just spin and spin as long as it takes until the script was done - even if it takes an hour, but they changed things and now, it imposes its own cutoff time is the server doesn't respond fast enough while the server continues to execute the script.

Now, this is annoying, it forces me to log events to a file, rather than just dump to the screen, but the worst part is Chrome thinks it is a great idea to try reconnecting to the URL after it times out. That then starts to execute the same script which probably is already running again.

The issue here is that I often create scripts to run ONCE and never again, and if the script is run more than once, it could completely destroy things.

Say I create a script to remove the first 4 characters from each field in a 1 million row database. Running the script via Chrome would eventually time out and then it would run the script again several times without letting you know. Suddenly, the data that was already reduced is being reduced again, destroying the data.

This is a serious concern that was never an issue before because Chrome wouldn't automatically try to reload a page that failed to load. So, I'm looking for a way to disable this new feature and stop Chrome from automatically reloading on a failed page load. It displays an error page saying "Click here to reload", but it completely ignores the user and decides to reload whether you click it or not.

I just ran a script to copy files from an EC2 instance to an S3 bucket as part of some cleanup, but I see from the logs that it actually ran 4 times before I closed the tab - even though I never asked it to reload. That meant it copied these same files 4 times. Fortunately, in this case, it just wasted S3 access, since it overwrote the existing files.

Yes, I realize that there are many ways of preventing the script from running more than once, from flock to renaming the file immediately after executing it. The issue is speed. These fix scripts are not intended to be full blown applications complete with all the bells and whistles, they are meant to be a fast way to apply a fix. I would rather make a change in Chrome to disable the new way it works so that I can continue to work as I have for over 10 years.

This is referring to an auto reload, and I'm not calling it a "refresh" because the page never loaded in the first place. This has nothing to do with the millions of questions regarding refreshes, and that is all I get when trying to search this problem out.

Answer 1

Probably this can resolve the issue:

1. go to chrome://flags/
2. set to Disabled flag Enable Offline Auto-Reload Mode (or Offline Auto-Reload Mode)
3. set to Disabled flag Only Auto-Reload Visible Tabs
4. Relaunch browser

Now I have page with error ERR_CONNECTION_RESET that does not reload itself automatically anymore