modilabs/formhub — Issue #103: Extending timeout on form submissions
Author: mberg
Created: 2012-01-18 02:57:51+00:00
State: open

I think we want to bump this up a bit especially since many of our submissions will be coming from crappy internet connections.

I'm not sure what the optimal setting would be vis-a-vis the performance hit we'll take for that (if there is one).

This should probably be of relatively high importance as we don't want to scare away early adopters of our system with 500 errors.

Here is feedback from the ODK mailing list:

AppEngine puts a limit of 60 seconds on a submission attempt. ODK Aggregate will also experience a 500 error code over a slow connection. ODK Collect limits the size of a submission to about 10 MB to both help limit the VM requirements on the server and to bound the transmission time. But if your transmission rate is less than 1.3 Mbit/sec, you will likely get a 500 during a 10MB upload. Note that the OpenRosa standard defines an X-OpenRosa-Accept-Content-Length that could be used to inform the client to change the transmission size to something other than 10MB. We don't yet support that. Once we do, it might be a server preferences setting that could be used to knock down the max transmission size.

This isn't so much of an issue when running on Tomcat. The Tomcat configurations are described in http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/config/http.html As far as I can tell, we have a 10-minutes request timeout on Tomcat. If, however, you run Tomcat behind an Apache instance, you will also have fairly short timeouts by default on Apache and will need to configure the Apache webserver with a longer timeout.

In general, the web server container (e.g., Tomcat, Jetty) establishes the timeout thresholds for a request.