Does curl have a timeout?
Yes.
Timeout parameters
curl
has two options: --connect-timeout
and --max-time
.
Quoting from the manpage:
--connect-timeout <seconds>
Maximum time in seconds that you allow the connection to the
server to take. This only limits the connection phase, once
curl has connected this option is of no more use. Since 7.32.0,
this option accepts decimal values, but the actual timeout will
decrease in accuracy as the specified timeout increases in deci‐
mal precision. See also the -m, --max-time option.
If this option is used several times, the last one will be used.
and:
-m, --max-time <seconds>
Maximum time in seconds that you allow the whole operation to
take. This is useful for preventing your batch jobs from hang‐
ing for hours due to slow networks or links going down. Since
7.32.0, this option accepts decimal values, but the actual time‐
out will decrease in accuracy as the specified timeout increases
in decimal precision. See also the --connect-timeout option.
If this option is used several times, the last one will be used.
Defaults
Here (on Debian) it stops trying to connect after 2 minutes, regardless of the time specified with --connect-timeout
and although the default connect timeout value seems to be 5 minutes according to the DEFAULT_CONNECT_TIMEOUT
macro in lib/connect.h.
A default value for --max-time
doesn't seem to exist, making curl
wait forever for a response if the initial connect succeeds.
What to use?
You are probably interested in the latter option, --max-time
. For your case set it to 900
(15 minutes).
Specifying option --connect-timeout
to something like 60
(one minute) might also be a good idea. Otherwise curl
will try to connect again and again, apparently using some backoff algorithm.
There is timelimit: /usr/bin/timelimit - effectively limit the absolute execution time of a process
Options:
-p If the child process is terminated by a signal, timelimit
propagates this condition, i.e. sends the same signal to itself.
This allows the program executing timelimit to determine
whether the child process was terminated by a signal or
actually exited with an exit code larger than 128.
-q Quiet operation - timelimit does not output diagnostic
messages about signals sent to the child process.
-S killsig
Specify the number of the signal to be sent to the
process killtime seconds after warntime has expired.
Defaults to 9 (SIGKILL).
-s warnsig
Specify the number of the signal to be sent to the
process warntime seconds after it has been started.
Defaults to 15 (SIGTERM).
-T killtime
Specify the maximum execution time of the process before
sending killsig after warnsig has been sent. Defaults to 120 seconds.
-t warntime
Specify the maximum execution time of the process in
seconds before sending warnsig. Defaults to 3600 seconds.
On systems that support the setitimer(2) system call, the
warntime and killtime values may be specified in fractional
seconds with microsecond precision.
Better than --max-time
are the --speed-limit
and --speed-time
options. In short, --speed-limit
specifies the minimum average speed which you are willing to accept, and --speed-time
specifies how long the transfer speed can remain below that limit before the transfer times out and is aborted.