Customizing HTTP timeouts

When HttpUrlConnection connects, reads, or writes content over a low bandwidth network (2G, 3G, and so on), the exposure to unpredictable communication delays can not be avoided. Moreover, apart from the mobile network delays, the HTTP servers might introduce significant response delays (server latency) when they are experiencing high volumes of traffic.

Although the default timeout values used by the the HttpUrlConnection are long enough to cope with these delays, there are some special use cases where you might want to customize the default values according to your needs. For example, when on the way to the application server, the HTTP request travels through some proxies.

HttpUrlConnection offers us two member methods that can be used to change the default timeouts:

void setConnectTimeout(int timeoutMillis)
void setReadTimeout(int timeoutMillis)

setConnectTimeout(int) is able to redefine the maximum time in milliseconds that our client is allowed to wait until...