Question

I am connecting to a web service and did not set any connect timeout and read timeout on HttpURLConnection. What is the default connect timeout and read timeout? Is it dependent on the Android phone? Or does Android/ Java has its own default value for the timeout?

When I try to get the value of my connect timeout (getConnectTimeout()) and read timeout (getReadTimeout()), it returns a value of 0 which I assume is the equivalent of infinity. However, even though their value is 0, there are times that I’m still receiving a request timeout error. So their value can’t be equal to infinity. Can someone enlighten me on this?

Answer 1

Did you do any research? The defaults are detailed in the documentation. Here’s the relevant parts:

public void setConnectTimeout (int timeout) Since: API Level 1

Sets the timeout value in milliseconds for establishing the connection
to the resource pointed by this URLConnection instance. A
SocketTimeoutException is thrown if the connection could not be
established in this time. Default is 0 which stands for an infinite
timeout.

public void setReadTimeout (int timeout) Since: API Level 1

Sets the timeout value in milliseconds for reading from the input
stream of an established connection to the resource. A
SocketTimeoutException is thrown if the connection could not be
established in this time. Default is 0 which stands for an infinite
timeout.

Also there is this note on timeouts:

URLConnection supports two timeouts: a connect timeout and a
read timeout. By default, operations never time out.

It might be possible that the server you are connecting to is timing out your client.