HttpURLConnection setConnectTimeout() has no effect

Question

I'm connecting to a simple RSS feed using HTTPUrlConnection. It works perfectly. I'd like to add a timeout to the connection since I don't want my app hanging in the event of a bad connection or whatever. This is the code I use and the setConnectTimeout method doesn't have any effect whatsoever.

        HttpURLConnection http = (HttpURLConnection) mURL.openConnection();         http.setConnectTimeout(15000); //timeout after 15 seconds ... 

If it helps I'm developing on android.

Answer 1

You should try to set the read timeout as well (http.setReadTimeout()). Oftentimes, a web server will happily accept your connection, but it might be slow in actually responding to the request.

Answer 2

You probably either/both:
1) Don't read anything from connection
2) Don't catch & handle the exception properly

As mentioned here, use logic similar to this:

int TIMEOUT_VALUE = 1000; try {     URL testUrl = new URL("http://google.com");     StringBuilder answer = new StringBuilder(100000);      long start = System.nanoTime();      URLConnection testConnection = testUrl.openConnection();     testConnection.setConnectTimeout(TIMEOUT_VALUE);     testConnection.setReadTimeout(TIMEOUT_VALUE);     BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(testConnection.getInputStream()));     String inputLine;      while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null) {         answer.append(inputLine);         answer.append("\n");     }     in.close();      long elapsed = System.nanoTime() - start;     System.out.println("Elapsed (ms): " + elapsed / 1000000);     System.out.println("Answer:");     System.out.println(answer); } catch (SocketTimeoutException e) {     System.out.println("More than " + TIMEOUT_VALUE + " elapsed."); }