Why is timeout request ignored in this Nodejs request

Let's assume you have a server in koa and you have a POST route which takes ~ 3 minutes to return a request.

According to the various sources, you set-up your server with the timeout by setting up

let app = new Koa();
let server=app.listen(3000);
server.timeout=5*60*1000; // set to 5 minutes

On the client side, you set-up a timeout as well and you send the post request with the timeout

  const request = await axios.post('https://somewebsite.herokuapp.com/testkeepalive', {}, {timeout:240000})
  console.log('request is ', request)

Why when sending the above, on the server it still returns a timeout error and doesn't execute as intended?

Info about /testkeepalive

  .post('/testkeepalive', async ctx => {
    console.log('request received')
    ctx.request.socket.setTimeout(5 * 60 * 1000)
    ctx.request.socket.setKeepAlive(true)
    await delay(3 * 60 * 1000) // we delay 3 mintues before returning the request
    ctx.body = "nice"
    ctx.status = 202
  })

Client side error:

EDIT: Code above is correct. The only issue was that I was using Heroku which times out to 30seconds. Moving the server elsewhere (e.g AWS EC2 + deploy server with https ssl certificate) made it work.

If you still want to use heroku, you can only do it by implementing background jobs. https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/background-jobs-queueing

Axios is showing you ERR_NETWORK so I think that means that some intermediary (perhaps a proxy in your hosting environment) has closed the socket.

Below is a test app I wrote that lets me separately set the serverTimeout, the clientTimeout and the serverDelay before sending a response. This allows you to simulate either client or server timeout and see exactly what the axios response is. This is generic Express since I'm not a koa person, but presumably, it is the same http server object in either case.

---

With these values configured such that the serverDelay is less than both serverTimeout and clientTimeout:

const serverTimeout = 10 * 1000;
const clientTimeout = 8 * 1000;
const serverDelay = 7 * 1000;

Then, I get the appropriate response from the server (no error).

---

With these values configured such that the serverTimeout is shorter than the serverDelay:

const serverTimeout = 5 * 1000;
const clientTimeout = 8 * 1000;
const serverDelay = 7 * 1000;

Then, I get Error socket hang up ECONNRESET.

---

With these values configured such that the clientTimeout is shorter than the serverDelay or serverTimeout:

const serverTimeout = 10 * 1000;
const clientTimeout = 5 * 1000;
const serverDelay = 7 * 1000;

Then, I get Error timeout of 5000ms exceeded ECONNABORTED.

---

So, it all seems to be working for me with no extra infrastructure in between the client and server. So, that plus the ERR_NETWORK error you see from Axios makes me think that a proxy in your hosting infrastructure is responsible for the error.

---

Here's the code I used:

import express from 'express';
import axios from 'axios';

const serverTimeout = 10 * 1000;
const clientTimeout = 8 * 1000;
const serverDelay = 7 * 1000;

function delay(t) {
    return new Promise(resolve => {
        setTimeout(resolve, t);
    })
}

const app = express();

app.get("/timeout", async (req, res) => {
    await delay(serverDelay);
    res.send("Hello");
});

const server = app.listen(80);
server.timeout = serverTimeout;


try {
    let result = await axios.get("http://localhost/timeout", { timeout: clientTimeout });
    console.log("Got Result", result.data);
} catch (e) {
    console.log("Error", e.message, e.code);
}
server.close();

Note also that there is no need to set a timeout separately on each incoming socket. The server timeout itself will handle that for you.