request - HTTP client timeout and server timeout

Question

According to this question: Where can I find the default timeout settings for all browsers? each every browser has a default setting for time out

The default timeout in Firefox17, after checking about:config is 115s. However I have tested to run some request in which I timed and it returned a request after >150~ seconds.

So I wonder how does it works, shouldn't Firefox have timed out before?

Answer 1

There's many forms of timeout, are you after the connection timeout, request timeout or time to live (time before TCP connection stops).

The default TimeToLive on Firefox is 115s (network.http.keep-alive.timeout)

The default connection timeout on Firefox is 250s (network.http.connection-retry-timeout)

The default request timeout for Firefox is 30s (network.http.pipelining.read-timeout).

The time it takes to do an HttpRequest depends on if a connection has been made this has to be within 250s which I'm guessing you're not after. You're probably after the request timeout which I think is 30,000ms (30s) so to conclude I'd say it's timing out with a connection time out that's why you got a response back after ~150s though I haven't really tested this.