Mysterious socket / HttpWebRequest timeouts

Question

I have a great app for capturing shoutcast streams :-) . So far, it worked with a charm on dozens of machines, and never exhibited behaviour I found now, which is ultimately very strange.

I use HttpWebRequest to connect to different shoutcast servers and when I connect two streams, everything's OK. When I go for third one,

   response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

throws with Connection Timeout exception.

WTF? I must point out that I had to create .config for the application in order to allow my headers to be sent out from the application, otherwise it wouldn't work at all. Here it is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
<system.net>
    <settings>
    <httpWebRequest useUnsafeHeaderParsing = "true" />
</settings>
</system.net>
</configuration>

Does any of this ring a bell?

Answer 1

Maybe the ShoutCast server you're connecting to only allows two concurrent connections from the same machine? Or maybe your local settings are only allowing two concurrent outgoing connections?

Answer 2

Probably this website has restriction on the number of simultaneous connections from the same ip address. Also take a look on

ServicePointManager.DefaultConnectionLimit

By default this value is 2. Change it to a bigger one.