Apache HttpClient timeout

There is currently no way to set a maximum request duration of that sort: basically you want to say I don't care whether or not any specific request stage times out, but the entire request must not last longer than 15 seconds (for example).

Your best bet would be to run a separate timer, and when it expires fetch the connection manager used by the HttpClient instance and shutdown the connection, which should terminate the link. Let me know if that works for you.

For a newer version of httpclient (e.g. http components 4.3 - https://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-4.3.x/index.html):

int CONNECTION_TIMEOUT_MS = timeoutSeconds * 1000; // Timeout in millis.
RequestConfig requestConfig = RequestConfig.custom()
    .setConnectionRequestTimeout(CONNECTION_TIMEOUT_MS)
    .setConnectTimeout(CONNECTION_TIMEOUT_MS)
    .setSocketTimeout(CONNECTION_TIMEOUT_MS)
    .build();

HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost(URL);
httpPost.setConfig(requestConfig);