How to set timeout on python s socket recv method

Question

I need to set timeout on python s socket recv method  How to do it

User · Answer

Got a bit confused from the top answers so I've wrote a small gist with examples for better understanding.

Option #1 - socket.settimeout()

Will raise an exception in case the sock.recv() waits for more than the defined timeout.

import socket

sock = socket.create_connection(('neverssl.com', 80))
timeout_seconds = 2
sock.settimeout(timeout_seconds)
sock.send(b'GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: neverssl.com\r\n\r\n')
data = sock.recv(4096)
data = sock.recv(4096) # <- will raise a socket.timeout exception here

Option #2 - select.select()

Waits until data is sent until the timeout is reached. I've tweaked Daniel's answer so it will raise an exception

import select
import socket

def recv_timeout(sock, bytes_to_read, timeout_seconds):
    sock.setblocking(0)
    ready = select.select([sock], [], [], timeout_seconds)
    if ready[0]:
        return sock.recv(bytes_to_read)

    raise socket.timeout()

sock = socket.create_connection(('neverssl.com', 80))
timeout_seconds = 2
sock.send(b'GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: neverssl.com\r\n\r\n')
data = recv_timeout(sock, 4096, timeout_seconds)
data = recv_timeout(sock, 4096, timeout_seconds) # <- will raise a socket.timeout exception here

User · Answer

The timeout that you are looking for is the connection socket s timeout not the primary socket s  if you implement the server side  In other words  there is another timeout for the connection socket object  which is the output of socket accept   method  Therefore   sock listen 1  connection  client address   sock accept   connection settimeout 5       This is the one that affects recv   method  connection gettimeout         This should result 5 sock gettimeout               This outputs None when not set previously  if I remember correctly    If you implement the client side  it would be simple   sock connect server address  sock settimeout 3

User · Answer

As mentioned in previous replies  you can use something like   settimeout   For example   import socket  s   socket socket    s settimeout 1    Sets the socket to timeout after 1 second of no activity  host  port    somehost   4444 s connect  host  port    s send  Hello World  r n    try      rec   s recv 100    try to receive 100 bytes except socket timeout    fail after 1 second of no activity     print  Didn t receive data   Timeout    finally      s close     I hope this helps

User · Answer

The typical approach is to use select   to wait until data is available or until the timeout occurs   Only call recv   when data is actually available   To be safe  we also set the socket to non-blocking mode to guarantee that recv   will never block indefinitely   select   can also be used to wait on more than one socket at a time   import select  mysocket setblocking 0   ready   select select  mysocket           timeout in seconds  if ready 0       data   mysocket recv 4096    If you have a lot of open file descriptors  poll   is a more efficient alternative to select     Another option is to set a timeout for all operations on the socket using socket settimeout    but I see that you ve explicitly rejected that solution in another answer

User · Answer

usr bin python3 6    - - coding  utf-8 - - import socket import time s   socket socket socket AF INET  socket SOCK DGRAM  s setsockopt socket SOL SOCKET  socket SO BROADCAST  1  s settimeout 5  PORT   10801  s bind      PORT   print  Listening for broadcast at    s getsockname    BUFFER SIZE   4096 while True      try          data  address   s recvfrom BUFFER SIZE      except socket timeout          print  Didn t receive data   Timeout 5s            continue

User · Answer

You could set timeout before receiving the response and after having received the response set it back to None   sock   socket socket socket AF INET  socket SOCK STREAM   sock settimeout 5 0  data   sock recv 1024  sock settimeout None

User · Answer

You can use socket settimeout   which accepts a integer argument representing number of seconds  For example  socket settimeout 1  will set the timeout to 1 second

User · Answer

there s socket settimeout

User · Answer

As mentioned both select select   and socket settimeout   will work   Note you might need to call settimeout twice for your needs  e g   sock   socket socket socket AF INET  socket SOCK STREAM  sock bind     0   sock listen 1    accept can throw socket timeout sock settimeout 5 0  conn  addr   sock accept      recv can throw socket timeout conn settimeout 5 0  conn recv 1024

User · Answer

try this it uses the underlying C   timeval   struct pack  ll   2  100  s setsockopt socket SOL SOCKET  socket SO RCVTIMEO  timeval

User · Answer

Shout out to  https   boltons readthedocs io en latest socketutils html It provides a buffered socket  this provides a lot of very useful functionality such as   recv until       recv until occurrence of bytes  recv closed      recv until close  peek             peek at buffer but don t pop values  settimeout       configure timeout  including recv timeout

[python] How to set timeout on python's socket recv method?

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