Connection Timeout vs. Request Timeout in reverse [balanced]proxies

[Federico Mennite <fe...@lifeware.ch>]

Hi,
up to the release of apache 2.2.4 the 'timeout' parameter of the 
BalancerMember directive would affect only the connection timout to the 
backend servers. This allowed to set reasonably small timeout 
values(let's say 1 or 2 seconds) in a scenario where the balancer and 
the backends would sit in the same LAN.
Starting from apache 2.2.6, it seems that the timeout value also affects 
the backend request completion timeout.

Unfortunately some of our backend requests may take up to 10s to complete.
Increasing the timeout value to 15 seconds causes an annoying 'stall' 
behavior when one of the backend servers becomes completely unreachable 
(e.g: power failure).

I think it definitively makes sense to have both timeouts configurable 
separately.
Are there already any plans in that direction?

Regards,
Federico

-- 
Federico Mennite                 
Software Engineer                
Lifeware SA                      Web:  http://www.lifeware.ch