Some time ago, I migrated the crawler off the okhttp library, to use Java’s builtin HTTP client. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but has led to a fair number of headaches. Java’s HttpClient has one damning flaw, and that that it doesn’t support socket timeouts. Its only supported timeout values are time to connect, and time until first byte of the response. This means the client can get stuck on a read call if a server stops responding, potentially for a very long time!
