This is one that comes up fairly infrequently and one that always seems to take way more Googling than it should to get a straight answer on this. When in fact, the answer to this question is an extremely simple one, well, usually.
If you are getting regular or intermittent errors with your scripts timing out, count the seconds. Most people are used to having a default timeout with something like Apache Httpd to be 30 seconds. Well, Apache Tomcat likes to play by it’s own rules here and doesn’t quite follow that standard which may leave you scratching your head for a while until you get to the bottom of it.
Here’s what the official Tomcat 8.5 documentation says on the topic;
“The number of milliseconds this Connector will wait, after accepting a connection, for the request URI line to be presented. Use a value of -1 to indicate no (i.e. infinite) timeout. The default value is 60000 (i.e. 60 seconds) but note that the standard server.xml that ships with Tomcat sets this to 20000 (i.e. 20 seconds). Unless disableUploadTimeout is set to false, this timeout will also be used when reading the request body (if any).”
Simple, right?
Basically, just check what you’ve got in your server.xml file and adjust accordingly as it’s not as straight forward as it should be.
But where is that file you may be wondering. Well, by default you’ll find the file at /{TOMCAT_HOME}/conf/server.xml so check there first.
This home directory is going to be different depending on operating system and how Tomcat was installed, so you may have to hunt around for this if you’ve not edited these settings before. Make a note of this file location as it will come in handy over time.
The line you are looking for is;
<!--60 Seconds--> <Connector URIEncoding="utf-8" connectionTimeout="60000" port="8084" protocol="HTTP/1.1" redirectPort="8443"/>
Simply change the value of the connectionTimeout attribute to what you need, restart Apache Tomcat 8 and re-run the script you were trying to execute which was timing out, things should work now.
Happy config!
Michael Cropper