Set socket timeout in Ruby via SO_RCVTIMEO socket option

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You can do this efficiently using select from Ruby’s IO class.

IO::select takes 4 parameters. The first three are arrays of sockets to monitor and the last one is a timeout (specified in seconds).

The way select works is that it makes lists of IO objects ready for a given operation by blocking until at least one of them is ready to either be read from, written to, or wants to raise an error.

The first three arguments therefore, correspond to the different types of states to monitor.

  • Ready for reading
  • Ready for writing
  • Has pending exception

The fourth is the timeout you want to set (if any). We are going to take advantage of this parameter.

Select returns an array that contains arrays of IO objects (sockets in this case) which are deemed ready by the operating system for the particular action being monitored.

So the return value of select will look like this:

[
  [sockets ready for reading],
  [sockets ready for writing],
  [sockets raising errors]
]

However, select returns nil if the optional timeout value is given and no IO object is ready within timeout seconds.

Therefore, if you want to do performant IO timeouts in Ruby and avoid having to use the Timeout module, you can do the following:

Let’s build an example where we wait timeout seconds for a read on socket:

ready = IO.select([socket], nil, nil, timeout)

if ready
  # do the read
else
  # raise something that indicates a timeout
end

This has the benefit of not spinning up a new thread for each timeout (as in the Timeout module) and will make multi-threaded applications with many timeouts much faster in Ruby.

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