proposal: net/http: allow setting timeouts individually in Client

[alex-leonhardt]

What version of Go are you using (go version)?

go1.9 darwin/amd64

Does this issue reproduce with the latest release?

yes

What operating system and processor architecture are you using (go env)?

GOARCH="amd64"
GOBIN=""
GOEXE=""
GOHOSTARCH="amd64"
GOHOSTOS="darwin"
GOOS="darwin"
GOPATH="/Users/ale/projects/go"
GORACE=""
GOROOT="/usr/local/go"
GOTOOLDIR="/usr/local/go/pkg/tool/darwin_amd64"
GCCGO="gccgo"
CC="clang"
GOGCCFLAGS="-fPIC -m64 -pthread -fno-caret-diagnostics -Qunused-arguments -fmessage-length=0 -fdebug-prefix-map=/var/folders/c6/5xqsbcl95j713z7y5tz1cp6m0000gn/T/go-build047959207=/tmp/go-build -gno-record-gcc-switches -fno-common"
CXX="clang++"
CGO_ENABLED="1"
CGO_CFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_CPPFLAGS=""
CGO_CXXFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_FFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_LDFLAGS="-g -O2"
PKG_CONFIG="pkg-config"

What did you do?

It's not a bug; more a feature request. When calling a HTTP endpoint using http.Client; it'd be great if it was possible to individually configure the connection timeout from the response timeout and a generic timeout that would count for both. Reason I'm asking for this is to be able to fail fast when a endpoint just isn't there, vs wait for potentially longer when there is a endpoint and it's slow to respond. I've found some implementation of this, but it is much more "work" than it really should be.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16895294/how-to-set-timeout-for-http-get-requests-in-golang

Cloudflare's blog is pretty good, and much more concise, however, still more than I would have expected : https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-complete-guide-to-golang-net-http-timeouts/

What did you expect to see?

http.Client{
  ConnectionTimeout: time.Duration,
  ResponseTimeout: time.Duration
}

What did you see instead?

http.Client{
  Timeout: time.Duration
}

[titanous]

@bradfitz I think this can be closed, because all of the timeouts mentioned are supported in http.Transport (and extensively explained in the two links provided).

[alex-leonhardt]

My point is I guess more that it could be made much much easier to use than it currently is; needing to know to have to setup your custom http.Transport with a custom net.Dialer is more than I guess most people were after when they simply need/want to set the above 2 timeouts. The two mentioned are in my opinion the two most used and useful, hence also only asking for those two.

Either way, I believe it'd be great to have this in net/http by default, not everyone would will need to wrap their own http.Client for configuring these two timeouts.

[rsc]

This seems very specific, and it's already possible. It's unclear we need to thread it through in a second way, from Client. More generally we need a nicer Client, and instead of adding one thing at a time there should be a redesign at some point. @bradfitz is going to make a tracking bug for the things we'd want to fix in a new Client.

[bradfitz]

I filed #23707 as a meta bug for tracking http.Client improvements, which could/should include more timeout control.

[alex-leonhardt]

Cool, I think I'm happy with it being part of the http.Client improvements in #23707 .
Thanks! 👍

[bradfitz]

Thanks. I'll close this one for now then.