I am looking for a method to detect if the gsoap web service is available. Unfortunately when the service is offline then the client gsoap calls block for a long time. Setting the soap.recv_timeout and the soap.send_timeout to zero do not help.
This is a bit late, but I finally found (what I think is) a better answer by skulking through the source code (why they don't document this, I don't know):
Look for "soap.connect_timeout". When I set this to 3, it times-out after 3 seconds as expected when the web service is unavailable.
The above recv_timeout and send_timeout didn't work for me in the case of "service unavailable".