I've been using a lot of APIs in my Ruby (usually Rails) applications and I've learnt my lesson regarding socket timeouts. Basically, no response (from an API) is better than a slow response. In the cases of slow responses, it's better to time out so your ActiveResource clients can end execution fast (i.e. fail-fast) instead of blocking (for the default Net::HTTP read_timeout value of 60 seconds) and locking up an entire web server process.
So the patches for ActiveResource:
* Introduce ActiveResource::Base.timeout to allow Net::HTTP#read_timeout to be set - #5 Introduce ActiveResource::Base.timeout to allow Net::HTTP#read_timeout to be set - Ruby on Rails - rails * ActiveResource::Connection should rescue from Timeout::Error - http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/6
Please take a look and share any comments/improvements and feel free to point out any flaws and laugh at my code.
Cheers, Chu Yeow
