Inside the “Request Timeout” thread was a discussion going on that was
pointing out that a request timeout cannot be catched by a try/catch, what
seems possible in ACF.
In my opinion this is a bug in ACF here here is my explanation why:
“Like i said, a request timeout is like pulling the plug, i assume you do
not pull the plug on your computer when you are done working, this has the
risk to destroy open file when they are in a transition. You only pull the
plug when the computer is frozen.With running requests it is exactly the
same, a request timeout always comes with the risk to destroy something,
maybe the request was just writing a file that then is only halfway done or
you have open streams that not get closed properly anymore …so you should
avoid request timeouts at any coast and never ever try to deal with them.if
a request timeout occurs, you need to find out why and solve that
problem.that is btw exactly the same as caching runtimeexcpetions in java,
that smells!”
The reason i’m writing all of this is because something else come to my
mind we discussed some time ago, sometimes it is maybe impossible to “fix”
a code segment that leads to a request timeout. Simply because that code
segment, for example, is dealing with external resources, you have no
influence on how long it takes for them to get done.
I had that problem in the Lucee admin when calling the ExtensionProvider to
get information from them. So i did the following (simplified):
// call the extension provider (maybe takes some time)
thread name=“getData” {
request.data=getDataFromExtensionProvider();
}
// give the thread a chance to finish
end=getTickCount()*10000;// now + 10 seconds
do {
sleep(100);// take a nap
}while(getData.status!=“completed” && getTickcount()>end); // wait until
the thread is done or we waited more than 10 seconds
if(getData.status!=“completed”) return request.data;
throw “not able to get data”;
So the idea is to do a new tag to does exactly this:
timeout timespan=“#createTimeSpan(0,0,0,10)#” result=“res” {
data=getDataFromExtensionProvider();
}
if(res.status==“completed”) return data;
throw “not able to get data”;
So you have a code block where you can define how long Lucee maximal can
spend time on it and stopping only that block if you want.
So you can avoid a request timeout by using this tag for time sensitive
code fragments.
What do you think?
Micha
