How to change the timeout on a .NET WebClient object.

Question

I am trying to download a client's data to my local machine (programatically) and their webserver is very, very slow which is causing a timeout in my WebClient object.

Here is my code:

WebClient webClient = new WebClient();

webClient.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8;
webClient.DownloadFile(downloadUrl, downloadFile);

Is there a way to set an infinite timeout on this object? Or if not can anyone help me with an example on an alternate way to do this?

The URL works fine in a browser - it just takes about 3 minutes to show.

Answer 1

You need to use HttpWebrequest rather than WebClient as you can't set the timeout on WebClient (even though it uses the HttpWebrequest). Using the HttpWebrequest instead will allow you to set the timeout.

Answer 2

As Sohnee says, using System.Net.HttpWebRequest and set the Timeout property instead of using System.Net.WebClient.

You can't however set an infinite timeout value (it's not supported and attempting to do so will throw an ArgumentOutOfRangeException).

I'd recommend first performing a HEAD HTTP request and examining the Content-Length header value returned to determine the number of bytes in the file you're downloading and then setting the timeout value accordingly for subsequent GET request or simply specifying a very long timeout value that you would never expect to exceed.