Set timeout for xmlrpclib.ServerProxy

Question

I am using xmlrpclib.ServerProxy to make RPC calls to a remote server. If there is not a network connection to the server it takes the default 10 seconds to return a socket.

Answer 1

I wanted a small, clean, but also explicit version, so based on all other answers here, this is what I came up with:

import xmlrpclib


class TimeoutTransport(xmlrpclib.Transport):

    def __init__(self, timeout, use_datetime=0):
        self.timeout = timeout
        # xmlrpclib uses old-style classes so we cannot use super()
        xmlrpclib.Transport.__init__(self, use_datetime)

    def make_connection(self, host):
        connection = xmlrpclib.Transport.make_connection(self, host)
        connection.timeout = self.timeout
        return connection


class TimeoutServerProxy(xmlrpclib.ServerProxy):

    def __init__(self, uri, timeout=10, transport=None, encoding=None, verbose=0, allow_none=0, use_datetime=0):
        t = TimeoutTransport(timeout)
        xmlrpclib.ServerProxy.__init__(self, uri, t, encoding, verbose, allow_none, use_datetime)


proxy = TimeoutServerProxy(some_url)

I didn't realize at first xmlrpclib has old-style classes so I found it useful with a comment on that, otherwise everything should be pretty self-explanatory.

I don't see why httplib.HTTP would have to be subclassed as well, if someone can enlighten me on this, please do. The above solution is tried and works.