You can make an instance of a socket object and call a gettimeout() method to get the default timeout value and the settimeout() method to set a specific timeout value. This is very useful in developing custom server applications.

We first create a socket object inside a test_socket_timeout() function. Then, we can use the getter/setter instance methods to manipulate timeout values.

Listing 1.6 shows socket_timeout as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env python  
# This program is optimized for Python 2.7.12 and Python 3.5.2. 
# It may run on any other version with/without modifications. 
 
 
import socket 
 
def test_socket_timeout(): 
    s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) 
    print ("Default socket timeout: %s" %s.gettimeout()) 
    s.settimeout(100) 
    print ("Current socket timeout: %s" %s.gettimeout())     
     
if __name__ == '__main__': 
    test_socket_timeout() 
 
 

After running the preceding script, you can see how this modifies the default socket timeout as follows:

$ python 11_6_socket_timeout.py 
Default socket timeout: None
Current socket timeout: 100.0