Slowly responding webpage and socket timeout

[Peter Wolfenstein]

hey!

I need to make a head request to different web pages. some respond relatively slowly (1-2 seconds) and so I don't get any results when trying to read them. I create the connection via sockets as UrlConnection doesn't support HEAD requests and apache commons httpclient library is little bit overhead for this project.

Here is my code:

        Socket clientSocket = new Socket();
        InetSocketAddress socketAddr = new InetSocketAddress (host, port);
        clientSocket.setSoTimeout (50000);
        clientSocket.setTcpNoDelay(true);
        clientSocket.connect (socketAddr);
        
        BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter ( new OutputStreamWriter (clientSocket.getOutputStream()));
        writer.write ("HEAD " + file + " HTTP/1.1\r\n");
        writer.write ("Host: " + host + ":" + port + "\r\n");
        writer.write ("Accept: */*\r\n");
        writer.write("\n");
        writer.flush();
        clientSocket.shutdownOutput();
 
        BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader ( new InputStreamReader (clientSocket.getInputStream()));
 
        String line;
 
        StringBuilder response = new StringBuilder();
        
        while (null != (line = reader.readLine())) {
            response.append (line + "\n");
        }
        
        clientSocket.shutdownInput();
        clientSocket.close();

The host and port variables are set properly. As you can see I have already set the socket timeout to 50 sec. which is very high and no method invocation has ever needed more than 4 secs.

So on most urls I get correct HTTP Headers but on some slower pages I don't get any results. How can I tell my code to wait for a few secs. until the response comes?

Thanks!!

Jakob

[Nitesh Kant]

Isn't socket timeout what you want?
You have already specified socket timeout, why dont you increase the same. Obviously, you should do this if you desperately want the response from those pages! It will not ensure that you will always get a response but will increase the probability. This is the best a client can do.

[Peter Wolfenstein]

Yes I set my timeout to 50 sec. however one method invocation takes not even a second so something must be wrong then. Can't a set something like a read timeout?!

Jakob