Question

I’m playing around with the HttpWebRequest class and got confused about the Timeout/ReadWriteTimeout members. The issues is that the ReadWriteTimeout gets ignored sometimes and then my application hangs exactly 5 minutes on my GetResponse() call. Sometimes it simply throws a WebException and sometimes it hangs for 5 minutes, which seems to be the default value. I even check the ReadWriteTimeout value before calling GetResponse() and it’s always the correct value, which I set to 10000.

var getPage = WebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest;
getPage.Accept = "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8";
getPage.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.19) Gecko/20110707 Firefox/3.6.19";
getPage.ProtocolVersion = HttpVersion.Version11;
getPage.Method = "GET";
getPage.CookieContainer = foo;
getPage.Proxy = proxyHTTP;
getPage.Timeout = 10000;
getPage.ReadWriteTimeout = 10000;

// in another function where I pass the getPage to

Console.WriteLine("Timeout: {0} / ReadWriteTimeout{1}", page.Timeout, page.ReadWriteTimeout);

var pageResponse = (HttpWebResponse)page.GetResponse();
Console.WriteLine("It reaches this line after 5 minutes");
if (pageResponse.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK)
{
    // read and close it afterwards
}

I am using a HTTP Proxy. The weird part is that the url loads fine in the browser. I’d be thankful for any input.

// EDIT BELOW

namespace Proxy
{
 class Program
 {
     static void Main(string[] args)
     {
        var htmlResponse = new StringBuilder();
        var RequestPage = BuildHttpRequest("https://twitter.com/signup");
        GetHttpResponse(RequestPage, htmlResponse);
    }
    public static HttpWebRequest BuildHttpRequest(string url)
    {
        try
        {
            var getPage = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
            WebProxy proxyHTTP = new WebProxy("201.38.194.50", 3128);


            getPage.Accept = "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8";
            getPage.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.19) Gecko/20110707 Firefox/3.6.19";
            getPage.ProtocolVersion = HttpVersion.Version11;
            getPage.Method = "GET";
            getPage.Proxy = proxyHTTP;
            getPage.Timeout = 10000;
            getPage.ReadWriteTimeout = 10000;
            return getPage;
        }
        catch (WebException ex)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString());
        }

        return null;
    }
    public static bool GetHttpResponse(HttpWebRequest page, StringBuilder html)
    {
        html.Clear();
        try
        {
            Console.WriteLine("A");
            var pageResponse = (HttpWebResponse)page.GetResponse();
            Console.WriteLine("5 minutes!");
            if (pageResponse.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK)
            {

                var reader = new StreamReader(pageResponse.GetResponseStream());
                html.Append(reader.ReadToEnd());
                pageResponse.Close();
                reader.Close();
                return true;
            }
            Console.WriteLine(pageResponse.StatusCode.ToString());
            pageResponse.Close();
            return false;
        }
        catch (WebException ex)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString());
        }

        return false;
    }
}

}

    A first chance exception of type 'System.Net.WebException' occurred in System.dll
    System.Net.WebException: The operation has timed out
    at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetResponse()

Answer 1

Can you try this

    var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
    using (var pageResponse = request.GetResponse())
    {
       // Do stuff with `response` here 
    } 
// drop the as HttpWebRequest; 

// The response however is, these will eventually be reclaimed by the GC 
// but you'll run into problems similar to deadlocks if you don't dispose them yourself 
// when you have many of them