android httpclient hangs on second request to the server (connection timed out)

Solution 1:

Sounds like you don't consume the entity after you finish handling the response. Ensure you put the following code in the finally block:

if (httpEntity != null) {
    try {
        httpEntity.consumeContent();
    } catch (IOException e) {
        Log.e(TAG, "", e);
    }
}

I suggest you read the HttpClient Tutorial.

Solution 2:

Sounds strange, but I had the exact same problem. The app I was working on was making several successive requests to download a bunch of thumbnail images to display in a ListView, and after the second one it would hang as if there was a dead lock in the HttpClient code.

The strange fix that I found was to use AndroidHttpClient instead of DefaultHttpClient. As soon as I did this, and I tried a lot of stuff before going this route, it started working just fine. Just remember to call client.close() when you're done with the request.

AndroidHttpClient is described in the documentation as DefaultHttpClient with "reasonable default settings and registered schemes for Android". Since this was introduced in api level 8 (Android 2.2), I dug up the source to duplicate these "default settings" so that I could use it further back than that api level. Here is my code for duplicating the defaults and a helper class with a static method for safely closing it

public class HttpClientProvider {

    // Default connection and socket timeout of 60 seconds. Tweak to taste.
    private static final int SOCKET_OPERATION_TIMEOUT = 60 * 1000;

    public static DefaultHttpClient newInstance(String userAgent)
    {
        HttpParams params = new BasicHttpParams();

        HttpProtocolParams.setVersion(params, HttpVersion.HTTP_1_1);
        HttpProtocolParams.setContentCharset(params, HTTP.DEFAULT_CONTENT_CHARSET);
        HttpProtocolParams.setUseExpectContinue(params, true);

        HttpConnectionParams.setStaleCheckingEnabled(params, false);
        HttpConnectionParams.setConnectionTimeout(params, SOCKET_OPERATION_TIMEOUT);
        HttpConnectionParams.setSoTimeout(params, SOCKET_OPERATION_TIMEOUT);
        HttpConnectionParams.setSocketBufferSize(params, 8192);

        SchemeRegistry schReg = new SchemeRegistry();
        schReg.register(new Scheme("http", PlainSocketFactory.getSocketFactory(), 80));
        schReg.register(new Scheme("https", SSLSocketFactory.getSocketFactory(), 443));
        ClientConnectionManager conMgr = new ThreadSafeClientConnManager(params, schReg);

        DefaultHttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient(conMgr, params);

        return client;
    }

}

And in another class...

public static void safeClose(HttpClient client)
{
    if(client != null && client.getConnectionManager() != null)
    {
        client.getConnectionManager().shutdown();
    }
}

Solution 3:

I've got the same trouble, when executing several requests in a loop.

You can solve it by reading all of response.getEntity().