Setting Curl's Timeout in PHP

See documentation: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php

CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT - The number of seconds to wait while trying to connect. Use 0 to wait indefinitely.
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT - The maximum number of seconds to allow cURL functions to execute.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 0); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 400); //timeout in seconds

also don't forget to enlarge time execution of php script self:

set_time_limit(0);// to infinity for example

Hmm, it looks to me like CURLOPT_TIMEOUT defines the amount of time that any cURL function is allowed to take to execute. I think you should actually be looking at CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT instead, since that tells cURL the maximum amount of time to wait for the connection to complete.

There is a quirk with this that might be relevant for some people... From the PHP docs comments.

If you want cURL to timeout in less than one second, you can use CURLOPT_TIMEOUT_MS, although there is a bug/"feature" on "Unix-like systems" that causes libcurl to timeout immediately if the value is < 1000 ms with the error "cURL Error (28): Timeout was reached". The explanation for this behavior is:

"If libcurl is built to use the standard system name resolver, that portion of the transfer will still use full-second resolution for timeouts with a minimum timeout allowed of one second."

What this means to PHP developers is "You can't use this function without testing it first, because you can't tell if libcurl is using the standard system name resolver (but you can be pretty sure it is)"

The problem is that on (Li|U)nix, when libcurl uses the standard name resolver, a SIGALRM is raised during name resolution which libcurl thinks is the timeout alarm.

The solution is to disable signals using CURLOPT_NOSIGNAL. Here's an example script that requests itself causing a 10-second delay so you can test timeouts:

if (!isset($_GET['foo'])) {    // Client    $ch = curl_init('http://localhost/test/test_timeout.php?foo=bar');    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOSIGNAL, 1);    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT_MS, 200);    $data = curl_exec($ch);    $curl_errno = curl_errno($ch);    $curl_error = curl_error($ch);    curl_close($ch);    if ($curl_errno > 0) {        echo "cURL Error ($curl_errno): $curl_error\n";    } else {        echo "Data received: $data\n";    }} else {    // Server    sleep(10);    echo "Done.";}

From http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php#104597