Safari "time out" has been shortened... a fix?

As a PHP developer (who works with an occasional long-running back-end script), I run into this problem now and then. To solve the problem in the scripts I write, I make sure something is output to the browser while it's waiting for the script to complete. Actually, a certain number of bytes needs to be output. I'm not sure how much, but one script I've just written outputs 7KB within the first two minutes to keep Safari from timing out. 4KB wasn't enough I think. (Basically it outputs a short status message, and then 200 spaces, which aren't rendered by the browser but will appear in the source code.)

I don't know how to solve the problem if you're not the developer of the web site that's causing you problems, though!!

Scott

(I'm not sure, but you might also have to add a linefeed ("\n") every so often in the browser source...)

Yeah, that's great, except as you said, if not not the developer of a "web page".

BIG WARNING to those who do firmware updates on network equipment, say a router, which I just HOSED.

When the timeout comes up, you buy a new router if you upload has not completed.

This is a major problem.

Actually, I'm not sure that my workaround is working. I think something has changed in a recent version of Safari (last month or so). I don't think any of my long-loading scripts work in Safari anymore.

Scott

Sending data to the browser no longer keeps it alive. This is a serious problem.

HOLY CRAP is this one **** of a problem...

I'm telling everyone I know to ditch Safari at once.

This is complete INEXCUSABLE BEHAVIOR. The HTTP connections should STAY OPEN indefinitely.

This bug is UNSOLVED.

I agree, what is with this nonsense? I'm developing a simulator in PHP and there are options for the user to do some incredibly long runs, that all require more than one minute of server time. I could not figure out the problem at first as I was only getting the Safari error with no message about timing out. It should at least tell you that this is what it has done. Thank goodness for Firefox, otherwise I would be forced to continue development on Windows!

Please Apple, could you let us know when and if this will be sorted.

Thansk!

Message was edited by: SabaiSabai

I'm just chiming in to add support to getting this fixed. I'm writing a web application that does some intensive crunching on request by the browser before spitting back a result. Eventually, I'll cache the information in some fashion, but I want to be able to get "live" data for now in testing. This timeout is killing me.

Back to Firefox, I guess.

Well, I found a workaround for now but it's really obtuse. Since I'm using Java, I just store the HTML (SVG in this case) output in a session object and check for that before doing the crunching. That way, Safari calls the servlet, the servlet takes its time to produce the result and sticks it in a session object (as well as trying to spit it back to Safari, which has by this time timed out). Then I can just refresh Safari and pull the data from the session object to view it.

To initiate a refresh, I just invalidate the session object and start again. It's stupid that I have to resort to such measures.

Message was edited by: maestro371

Hi,
Is Apple working on this? I have the same problem ever and I started to notice it when the last OS update was applied. If Safari waits for a page for any short amount of time I get the spinning color wheel and Force Quit indicates that Safari is not responding. I let it wait sometimes for up to 60 seconds and then Safari finally responds. Any suggestions would help. Thanks, Rick

Interesting tidbit of information that may help narrow the culprit code: Safari does not timeout when I call my servlet directly ("http://server/servlet/ServletName/"). However, when I include that servlet in an object within a JSP like:

<object data="/servlet/ServletName" type="image/svg+xml" id="svg" width="800" height="450"></object>

...the browser times out before the server can process the data to send back. The rest of the JSP is displayed (DIV borders, et cetera), but the embedded object is not.

Firefox 3 was really annoying me with random hangups and delays, so I thought maybe I would switch over to Safari for a while. The very first thing I wanted to do I got the timeout message on a long-running page. Are you kidding? If I'm willing to wait over a minute why isn't Safari? I am going to check if this problem exists in Webkit. There has to be a setting for this somewhere, right?