Setting Curl's Timeout in PHP

Question

I'm running a curl request on an eXist database through php. The dataset is very large, and as a result, the database consistently takes a long amount of time to return an XML response. To fix that, we set up a curl request, with what is supposed to be a long timeout.

$ch = curl_init();
$headers["Content-Length"] = strlen($postString);
$headers["User-Agent"] = "Curl/1.0";

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $requestUrl);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, 'admin:');
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,1000);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

However, the curl request consistently ends before the request is completed (<1000 when requested via a browser). Does anyone know if this is the proper way to set timeouts in curl?

Answer 1

Hmm, it looks to me like CURLOPT_TIMEOUT defines the amount of time that any cURL function is allowed to take to execute. I think you should actually be looking at CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT instead, since that tells cURL the maximum amount of time to wait for the connection to complete.

Answer 2

You can't run the request from a browser, it will timeout waiting for the server running the CURL request to respond. The browser is probably timing out in 1-2 minutes, the default network timeout.

You need to run it from the command line/terminal.