Firefox 29 now aborts unresponsive HTTP requests after 300 seconds

Posted by Dan on May 1, 2014 @ 9:30 AM

While this shouldn't affect most users (and by and large is probably a good thing), I noticed that Firefox 29 started automatically aborting requests after 300 seconds if the server has responded. As a developer, I often have test scripts that can take a very long time to run to completion, so this change was causing me some issues running a script to validate some data.

The change appears to be with the network.http.response.timeout setting in the about:config menu. It appears this setting used to be undefined, but it now set to 300.

It appears setting the value to 0 will reset the behavior so that Firefox will no longer automatically abort requests. Once I made this change, my test script starting running successfully (it's final runtime was about 6 minutes.)

Anyway, I don't expect this to affect most people. I think the impact is going to be felt mostly by developers who might have unit tests that run via a browser or other test scripts which could take a very long time to run.

Categories: HTML/ColdFusion

4 Comments

  • Mike's Gravatar
    Mike
    Your the man!! Fellow developer and small business owner. I have some scripts that crunch through some big CSV files and take some time to finish up. Never had a problem until v29. I had to roll back to 28 and started looking at some background implementations to get the job done. This will save me the hassle!
  • Dan G. Switzer, II's Gravatar
    Dan G. Switzer, II
    I figured there would be other developers bit by this issue. I think for the vast majority of people, it probably makes sense. You should also be able to bypass the issue if you can get your server script to start flushing output to the response stream, but the we're using gzip and I haven't found a good way to programmatically bypass the gzip for specific requests in our environment.
  • Tom's Gravatar
    Tom
    Thanks a lot for this hint! Our JSF-Webapplication uses the Richfaces ProgressBar for long lasting operations.
    Operations taking more than 300 secs were causing a network timeout in FF29.
    With response.timeout set to 0 no problems again.
  • Tom's Gravatar
    Tom
    Thanks! I spent several weeks tracking this down!

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