Handling Timeouts with PHP5 SoapClient Extension
I was breaking my head towards a silly thing around SoapClient Calls. My actual project requires Soap Calls to certain providers and everytime I was calling the external server, I had to wait for the server response (if any) and if the server failed to respond accordingly… damn… Warnings and/or Errors displayed and boom… My great application just looked like… well, forget it, I just used the try and catch statements for that… not big deal.
So I jump over Google’s horse and looked around implementing timeouts! because that was a true issue. Can you imagine? A user makes a request I looked around my DB and suddenly that single SOAP call takes me one minute to respond. No good, time for a solution.
Found the way to do it, by setting a hidden parameter (not documented) named ‘connection_timeout’:
//
// setting a connection timeout (five seconds on the example)
//
$client = new SoapClient($wsdl, array("connection_timeout"=>15));
The above says wait 15 seconds before returning a fault if you cannot connect properly to the host. The parameter ‘connection_timeout’ addresses the time it takes to wait to connect to your host.
As Jim Plush’s said:
You’d have two timeouts set in your application one for how long it should take to actually connect to your remote host and a timeout for how long the socket connection should wait for a response from the server.
So, now we need to set the time we wait for a server response with the following:
ini_set('default_socket_timeout', 180);
With these two configuration options we control the time to wait for a Soap host connection and the time waiting for a Soap Service response. Just perfect.
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I'm a 38 year old Web Developer working from Ibiza, Balearic Islands, Spain. I am Founder and Lead Developer for