HTTP Request Timeout
Question: In Python 2.6, a new "timeout" parameter was added to the
httplib.HTTPConnection class:
<http://docs.python.org/library/httplib.html#httplib.HTTPConnection>

However, this is only a timeout for the connection to a server. I am looking
to set a timeout value for the **request** , not the connection. This doesn't
seem to be supported by httplib.

Is there any way to emulate this behavior?


Answer: You can set a global socket timeout (*):

    
    
    import socket
    
    timeout = 10
    socket.setdefaulttimeout(timeout)
    

* * *

(*) **EDIT** : As people in the comments correctly point out: This is
technically true, but it only has predictable results for tasks that involve a
single socket operation. An HTTP request consists of multiple socket
operations (e.g. DNS requests or other things that might be abstracted away
from an HTTP client). The timeout of the overall operation becomes
unpredictable because of that.

