HttpClient hangs on socketRead0 with successfully executed method

Question

In our web-application A user can submit a url. We will fetch the data and parse it server side. For each request we use an HttpClient with the following (relevant) settings

connectionManager.getParams().setConnectionTimeout(10000);
connectionManager.getParams().setSoTimeout(10000);

When I call HttpMethod.getResponseBody the status code has already been checked to be acceptable. At this point the thread hangs with this stack trace:

java.net.SocketInputStream.socketRead0 ( native code )
java.net.SocketInputStream.read ( SocketInputStream.java:150 )
java.net.SocketInputStream.read ( SocketInputStream.java:121 )
java.io.BufferedInputStream.read1 ( BufferedInputStream.java:273 )
java.io.BufferedInputStream.read ( BufferedInputStream.java:334 )
java.io.FilterInputStream.read ( FilterInputStream.java:133 )
org.apache.commons.httpclient.AutoCloseInputStream.read ( AutoCloseInputStream.java:108 )
java.io.FilterInputStream.read ( FilterInputStream.java:107 )
org.apache.commons.httpclient.AutoCloseInputStream.read ( AutoCloseInputStream.java:127 )
org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodBase.getResponseBody ( HttpMethodBase.java:690 )

I cannot discover the exact URL for which this happened (was an incident on a live environment) and I have been unable to reproduce it. I'd like to think it's simply a matter of the server we're connecting to behaving strangely, but perhaps I'm missing something. In either case, is there a way for me to prevent the blocking method call from waiting forever? The SoTimeout is also the socket read timeout? Is there another setting I'm missing?

Answer 1

I have all the timeouts setup just fine but I found out we have on url that does http chunking but sends no results(works fine in chrome, but in http client it hangs forever even with the timeout set). Luckily I own the server and just return some garbage and it no longer hangs. This seems like a very unique bug in that http client does not handle some kind of empty chunking case well(though I could be way off)....I just know it hangs every time on that same url with empty data and that url is http chunking csv download back to our http client.