Question

I’m running a PHP script via cron using Wget, with the following command:

wget -O - -q -t 1 http://www.example.com/cron/run

The script will take a maximum of 5-6 minutes to do its processing. Will WGet wait for it and give it all the time it needs, or will it time out?

Answer 1

According to the man page of wget, there are a couple of options related to timeouts — and there is a default read timeout of 900s — so I say that, yes, it could timeout.

Here are the options in question :

-T seconds
--timeout=seconds

Set the network timeout to seconds
seconds. This is equivalent to
specifying --dns-timeout,
--connect-timeout, and
--read-timeout, all at the same
time.

And for those three options :

--dns-timeout=seconds

Set the DNS lookup timeout to seconds
seconds.
DNS lookups that don’t
complete within the specified time
will fail.
By default, there is no
timeout on DNS lookups, other than
that implemented by system libraries.

--connect-timeout=seconds

Set the connect timeout to seconds
seconds.
TCP connections that take
longer to establish will be aborted.

By default, there is no connect
timeout, other than that implemented
by system libraries.

--read-timeout=seconds

Set the read (and write) timeout to
seconds seconds.
The “time” of
this timeout refers to idle time: if,
at any point in the download, no data
is received for more than the
specified number of seconds, reading
fails and the download is restarted.

This option does not directly
affect the duration of the entire
download.

I suppose using something like

wget -O - -q -t 1 --timeout=600 http://www.example.com/cron/run

should make sure there is no timeout before longer than the duration of your script.

(Yeah, that’s probably the most brutal solution possible ^^ )