How to set timeout for urlfetch in Google App Engine?

Question

I'm trying to have Django (on top of GAE) fetch data from another web service. I'm often hit with error like this:

ApplicationError: 2 timed out Request

Method: GET

Request URL:http://localhost:8080/

Exception Type: DownloadError

Exception Value: ApplicationError: 2 timed out

Exception Location: /google_appengine/google/appengine/api/urlfetch.py in _get_fetch_result, line 325

It feels as if it will time out only after 12 seconds (I'm not sure, but it's really short).

Question: how can I set a longer timeout?

Answer 1

You can set it using the deadline argument of the fetch function. However, the maximum urlfetch timeout on GAE is 10 seconds. From the docs:

You can set a deadline for a request, the most amount of time the service will wait for a response. By default, the deadline for a fetch is 5 seconds. The maximum deadline is 10 seconds.

Answer 2

It seems short but you have to know that the timeout of a request on GAE is around 30 seconds. As you probably need to do some operations on the response of your urlfetch, there's no need to have a timeout more than 10 seconds I think.