Problem with HttpWebRequest when Timeout set to Infinite

Question

Hi,

Can any one help me?

I am using HttpWebRequest to upload files to server from a windows application. I set my request timeout property to infinite. i can not limit it to some predefined time as my File size may vary and net connection speed may vary from client to client.

Now my problem is, when request is waiting for response from server, if any network problem occurs at server side it won't send any response to client and my client application continuously waiting for the response and will block uploading other files. 

Is there any way that i can terminate my connection in these cases.

So how can i know if any network related problem occurred at server side.

My HttpWebRequest Properties:

theRequest.AllowWriteStreamBuffering = False
        theRequest.Accept = "*/*"
        theRequest.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials
        theRequest.KeepAlive = True
        theRequest.Method = "POST"
        theRequest.SendChunked = True
        theRequest.Timeout = System.Threading.Timeout.Infinite
        theRequest.UseDefaultCredentials = True
        theRequest.UserAgent = My.Application.Info.ProductName
       theRequest.CookieContainer = New CookieContainer()

Thanks

Srinivas Koneti

Answer 1

I think the HttpWebRequest.Timeout applies to the "wait" to get the response stream, and doesn't matter once the receive has began. So it's wrong to think because you need to download big file, you should set the timeout to infinate.

Also:

To specify the amount of time to wait before a read or write operation times out, use the ReadWriteTimeout property.

Hope that it helps.

Answer 2

Hi cheong,

Thanks for your replay.

In my case i am uploading files to web server.  I am getting this error after i write entire file into request stream and waiting for response form the server. 

ReadWriteTimeout property will help me when writing to or reading from a stream.

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Thanks Srinivas Koneti

Answer 3

I see. Is the "web server" side code written by you too? If you can issue concurrent request (using different threads) to upload all the files at the same time, that'd help ease the blocking problem. (The requests will be treated as if they belongs to the same logon session as long as you pass the same CookieContainer to them)

Unfortunately the GetRequestStream() method does not return NetworkStream, so there's little you can do to control the "stuck in transfer" behaviour.

Answer 4

i only written web server code, in my case i can not upload all the files  at same time because i may have lot of file at the same time. 

is there any other method where i can send the file in chunks and for each chunk i will get a acknowledgement from server.

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Thanks Srinivas Koneti

Answer 5

You may want to try using DotNetZip library to compress the files into spanned archives, upload them one by one, and combine them to recovery the file at the server. In this way you get response for each (now much smaller) files you've uploaded.