Oh, I forgot to explain that the problem is even more important in the SSL module. In SSL, a single "recv()" may require to *send* data. The SSL protocol is more complex and may require multiple OpenSSL calls which imply multiple send/recv syscalls. I wrote a patch for the ssl module to implement the PEP 475: to recompute the timeout if the method (ex: select()) is interrupted by a signal. https://bugs.python.org/issue23853 My patch uses a global timeout, it doesn't reset the timeout at each successful OpenSSL function call. And so it changes the behaviour compared to Python 3.4. If we want to keep the same behaviour, we can always reset the timeout except if a function was interrupted by signal. I opened the issue because the handshake() hangs if I send a singal every millisecond, because the timeout is not recomputed. So select() is called in a loop, always with the same timeout, and it always fail with EINTR. Victor 2015-04-03 13:56 GMT+02:00 Victor Stinner :

Hi,

I reworked the socket and ssl modules to better handle signals (to implement the PEP 475, retry on EINTR). These changes require to recompute timeout because syscalls are calling in a loop until it doesn't with EINTR (or EWOULDBLOCK or EGAIN). Most socket methods exit when the underlying syscall succeed.

The problem is that the socket.sendall() method may require multiple syscalls. In this case, does the timeout count for the total time or only for a single syscall? Asked differently: should we reset the timeout each time a syscall succeed?

Let's say that a server limits the bandwidth to 10 MB per second per client (or per connection). If I want to send 1000 MB, the request will take 100 seconds. Do you expect a timeout exception on calling call sendall() with a timeout of 60 seconds? Each call to send() may succeed in less than 60 seconds, for example each send() may send 1 MB in one second.

In the socket documentation, I understand that the socket timeout is the total duration of an operation, not the maximum duration of a single syscall:

https://docs.python.org/dev/library/socket.html#socket-timeouts "In timeout mode, operations fail if they cannot be completed within the timeout specified for the socket (they raise a timeout exception) or if the system returns an error."

In Python 2.7, 3.4 and 3.5, socket.sendall() resets the timeout after each send() success.

We had similar questions in the asyncio module, especially for StreamReader methods which can require multiple reads. I propose a patch to add a timeout parameter to StreamReader: it resets the timeout after each successful read. It's already possible to put a global timeout on any asyncio operationg. StreamReader timeout patch: https://bugs.python.org/issue23236

Note: there is also an open issue to add a socket.recvall() method which would open similar question on timeout: https://bugs.python.org/issue1103213

Victor