How to set the timeout?

[szabgab]

I have code like this:

my $feed = XML::Feed->parse(URI->new($url))

and now it seems to be stuck on https://www.perl.com/article/index.xml

I looked at the documentation of XML::Feed, but could not find what is the default timeout and how I could set the timeout. It might be useful to add it.

Actually I updated my code to report the elapsed time and now I see it took 137 seconds, but apparently the request was successful.
BTW this is the script: https://github.com/szabgab/perlweekly/blob/master/bin/stats.pl

$ perl -MXML::Feed -E 'say $XML::Feed::VERSION'
0.65

---

It is strange what's going on as both the XML::Feed request and wget are stuck. Even wget https://www.perl.com/ is stuck while I can use my regular browser to access the site without any problem.

[davorg]

XML::Feed uses LWP::UserAgent to handle the HTTP requests. But it uses it in a very annoying way.

sub get_uri {
    my $class = shift;
    my ($stream) = @_;

    my $ua  = LWP::UserAgent->new;
    $ua->agent(__PACKAGE__ . "/$VERSION");
    $ua->env_proxy; # force allowing of proxies
    my $res = URI::Fetch->fetch($stream, UserAgent => $ua)
        or return $class->error(URI::Fetch->errstr);
    return $class->error("This feed has been permanently removed")
        if $res->status == URI::Fetch::URI_GONE();
    return $res->content;
}

The UserAgent object is created each time a URI is fetched. And there's no way to adjust the parameters passed to the constructor. So you're stuck with the default LWP::UserAgent timeout value of 180 seconds. You're also stuck with the default useragent string.

So the fix is to make the UserAgent a persistent attribute of the XML::Feed object and to add a method which returns the UserAgent attribute so its internal values can be changed.

Unfortunately, the internal architecture of this module isn't particularly simple to adapt like that. But it's an interesting problem and I'll take a look at it. I'll let you know how it goes

[davorg]

I've created #67 to track the underlying work.

[davorg]

I've marked #67 as complete.

Once you have XML::Feed v1.0.0 the solution is to build your own UA object and pass it to the parse() method.

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new( timeout => 15 );

my $feed = XML::Feed->parse(URI->new($url), { useragent => $ua })

[davorg]

Of course, none of this fixes the underlying problem - which is perl.com responding slowly to LWP requests. Maybe contact noc.perl.org about that.

[szabgab]

Thanks.