Question

I am currently using the DefaultHttpClient to create an HTTP request to a rails server.

The network call is failing about 4% of the time with a SocketTimeoutException.

I have run Wireshark on my network traffic and discovered the following:

My successful call starts like this

And ends like this

The failed call starts like this:

And ends like this

Please note that the HTTP OK message that is sent to us from the server is missing from the end call, resulting in it timing out after about 15 seconds.

I am wondering if anybody has encountered this before or has any recommendations for debugging the Android Apache library or Apache rails to figure out why we are not receiving the HTTP OK message from the server.

Answer 1

I figured this out. The rails server and apache library were timing out if there were bad parameters in my post request. We were passing in a “_b” parameter, and for some unknown reason the server wouldn’t like this and would time out the request. Removing the bad post parameter fixed the problem.

If anybody else is seeing timeouts like this, I recommend reviewing the POST parameters that are being passed in.