Error timed out with succesfull wp_remote_post

Question

What I'm trying to do: Passing POST data by using wp_remote_post.

foreach ( $articles as $article_id ) {
    $postarray = array(
    'method'        => 'POST',
    'timeout'       => 5,
    'redirection'   => 5,
    'httpversion'   => '1.0',
    'blocking'      => true,
    'headers'       => array(),
    'body'          => array(
        'article_id' => $article_id
        ),
    'cookies' => array()
    );

    $response = wp_remote_post($url, $postarray);

    if ( is_wp_error($response) ) {
        $error_message = $response->get_error_message();
        echo $error_message;
    } else {
        // the rest of my code here
    }
}

I'm working with 20+ posts per call. Everytime the loop finish, I get this error message:

"Operation timed out after 5001 milliseconds with 0 bytes received"

The strange thing is, the data are actually received and stored successfully on the designated $url server.

Can anyone point me to the right direction, where should I look to avoid getting that error message?

Reference: wp_remote_post

Answer 1

You can set the timeout directly in the wp_remote_post() $args, as per this example from developer.wordpress.org:

$response = wp_remote_post( $url, array(
    'method'      => 'POST',
    'timeout'     => 45,
    'redirection' => 5,
    'httpversion' => '1.0',
    'blocking'    => true,
    'headers'     => array(),
    'body'        => array(
        'username' => 'bob',
        'password' => '1234xyz'
    ),
    'cookies'     => array()
    )
);

if ( is_wp_error( $response ) ) {
    $error_message = $response->get_error_message();
    echo "Something went wrong: $error_message";
} else {
    echo 'Response:<pre>';
    print_r( $response );
    echo '</pre>';
}

One other thing to note: in this example, the timeout is 45 seconds, but in many cases, that will exceed the PHP max_execution_time time limit, so you'll still get an error, but this time, a fatal PHP (500) error rather than the http error returned by WordPress (so you're actually worse off!).

This can be solved by setting max_execution_time in your php.ini, or, if you're not running in safe_mode (unlikely on a production server), you can attempt to set it programatically within your code, as per the example below:

$timeout = 45;
if ( ! ini_get( 'safe_mode' ) ){
    set_time_limit( $timeout + 10 );
}

$response = wp_remote_post( $url, array(
    'timeout' => $timeout
) );

Here, I set the PHP timeout to 10 seconds more than the HTTP timeout, just to be safe.

Also, it would be a best practice to then reset the timeout back to what it was, which is probably the value returned by ini_get( 'max_execution_time' );

Answer 2

After quite some time letting the error message bugging my screen, I figured out a way to solve this.

Yes, it's a timeout issue, and the codex didn't help me much. So I tried another approach, by setting a filter;

add_filter( 'http_request_timeout', 'wp9838c_timeout_extend' );

function wp9838c_timeout_extend( $time )
{
    // Default timeout is 5
    return 10;
}

I hope this could be another reference for someone else in the future.