A couple of weeks ago I had a problem loading something via SqueakMap that resulted in a 504 error. Chris M quite rightly pointed out that responding to a timeout with an immediate retry might not be the best thing (referencing some code I published to try to handle this problem); looking at the error more closely I finally noticed that a 504 is a *gateway* timeout rather than anything that seems likely to be a problem at the SM or MC repository server. Indeed the error came back much quicker than the 45 seconds timeout that we seem to have set for our http connections.

I'm a long way from being an expert in the area of connecting to servers via gateways and what their timeous might be etc. so excuse stupid-question syndrome - I know this isn't Quora where stupid-question is the order of the day. 
Am I right in thinking that a 504 error means that some *intermediate* server timed out according to some setting in its internal config ?
Am I right in imagining that we can't normally affect that timeout?

If I have any reasonable grasp on this then we  should probably detect the 504 (in part by explicitly using a WebClient and its error handling rather than the slightly wonky httpSocket faced we have currently) and retry the connection ? Any other error or a timeout at *our* end would still be best handled as an error. 

Except of course a 418 which has well defined error handling... 

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
You forgot to do your backup 16 days ago.  Tomorrow you'll need that version.