926208 - xmlhttprequest timeout doesn't work

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect)

Description

[Aquila]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130910160258

Steps to reproduce:

I have a user script, which send xml http request to a rest service, the response can be very big and the service can take over one minute to reply, so I have added a timeout of two minutes to the request.

var xhr=new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.timeout=2*60*1000;
xhr.ontimeout=ontimeoutRequest;


Actual results:

The request ends after one minute, I see it in firebug, and the timeout event never fire.


Expected results:

The request should wait two minutes before timeout and after two minutes fire the timeout event.

Comment 1

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

Aquila, this may be a dupe of bug 805571 or bug 868697. I am not sure if the documentation is incorrect or if there is a bug related to the request timeouts.  You might take a look for now at the comments in bug 525816 as well.

Comment 2

[Alex Vincent [:WeirdAl]]

Aquila, can you post the entirety of the code you use to set up and dispatch the XHR?

Also, if Mozilla's own networking code aborts the request before the timeout is reached, there's really no support for that.  (No one to my knowledge has tried firing a XHR with a timeout of an hour, or a day, for example... so I don't know how Mozilla code would react.)

Comment 3

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

If the request is processed within one minute, why should a 2 minute timeout fire ever?

Looks like the spec is odd here. Something has happened to it, since I think it was less wrong
at some point. Right now it doesn't normatively define when to dispatch timeout event.

Comment 4

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

Nm, it is there. "timeout error". So the event should be dispatched while we're processing the
request. But the spec should be more clear.

Comment 5

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

Based on the comment 0 this is invalid, but if there is a testcase which shows timeout
isn't dispatched while the request is still active, please reopen.

Comment 6

[Aquila]

@Alex Vincent

The code is very simple, is generic and used from many other functions.

var xhr=new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open("GET",url);
xhr.onload=requestLoad;
xhr.timeout=2*60*1000;
xhr.ontimeout=requestTimeout;
xhr.send();

Timeout is in milliseconds, at least according to the documentation https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/XMLHttpRequest

@Olli Pettay

The timeout is two minutes but after one minute the request timeouts, this is visible in firebug.

It's not so easy to create a test case, you must set up a web service that doesn't end the request and keep the connection open, something likes the long polling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_technology#Long_polling).