The Tideways blog has a post sharing things you can do in PHP to work with HTTP client timeouts in things that use the PHP sockets and streams.

Timeouts are a rarely discussed topic and neglected in many applications, even though they can have a huge effect on your site during times of high load and when dependent services are slow. For microservice architectures timeouts are important to avoid cascading failures when a service is down.

The default socket timeout in PHP is 60 seconds. HTTP requests performed with for example file_get_contents, fopen, SOAPClient or DOMDocument::load are using this timeout INI setting to decide how long to wait for a response.

He talks some about how these timeouts can effect your script and some of the common reactions (in code) to them happening. He then shows how to configure these timeouts to match the needs of you application in a few ways:

• globally in the ini configuration
• on a per-call basis in a stream_context_create call
• changing the load timeout for DOMDocument::load
• updating the setting for calls with SOAPClient
• changing the timeout on cURL extension calls

Each item on the list comes with the code/settings needed to make the change.