Http request timeout issue

Question

Hello everyone,

I am using VSTS 2008 + C# + .Net 3.5 to develop a console application and I send request to another server (IIS 7.0 on Windows Server 2008). Here is my code. My question is, as in my code, I use a while loop to read chunks by chunk from server. The timeout request.Timeout = Timeout * 1000 is responsible for (1) timeout for open connection to server, or (2) timeout for each read operation, or (3) the total time used for the while loop?

    static void PerformanceWorker()
    {
        Stream dataStream = null;
        HttpWebRequest request = null;
        HttpWebResponse response = null;
        StreamReader reader = null;
        try
        {
            request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(TargetURL);
            request.Timeout = Timeout * 1000;
            request.Proxy = null;
            response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
            dataStream = response.GetResponseStream();
            reader = new StreamReader(dataStream);

            // 1 M at one time
            char[] c = new char[1000 * 10];

            while (reader.Read(c, 0, c.Length) > 0)
            {
                globalCounter++;
            }
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            lock (counterLock)
            {
                globalFailCounter++;
                Console.WriteLine("Fail Counter: " + globalFailCounter + "\n" + ex.Message + "\n" + ex.StackTrace);
            }
        }
        finally
        {
            if (null != reader)
            {
                reader.Close();
            }
            if (null != dataStream)
            {
                dataStream.Close();
            }
            if (null != response)
            {
                response.Close();
            }
        }
    }

thanks in advance, George

Answer 1

1. Timeout for open connection to server

Answer 2

As from MSDN:

Timeout is the number of milliseconds that a subsequent synchronous request made with the GetResponse method waits for a response, and the GetRequestStream method waits for a stream. If the resource is not returned within the time-out period, the request throws a WebException with the Status property set to WebExceptionStatus.Timeout.

I'm in doubt if you can set timeout for read operation it easily without any low level trick. All data you are reading using response object is coming from network card buffer which is filled at the rate of your available network bandwidth. You would hit timeout at some point when performing reading when buffer is empty and no new data is coming from the sender end point.

P.S. this is more of a comment to the @Gary answer, maybe someone could move it there.