curl Timeout

Origin (context)

Opening a terminal tab it would take minutes until the prompt was available (as if it was frozen).

Exploration journey

I knew that instantiating a terminal session implies executing zshrc (the zsh run commands). But I had changed nothing in there.

I observed the processes being run when opening a tab. There I found that what was taking too long was a curl to http://whatthecommit.com/index.txt. This occurs every time I open the terminal because I have defined an alias that fetches an stupid message from this url and uses it as a commit message (sillycommit="git commit -m \"$(curl -s http://whatthecommit.com/index.txt)\"").

Also, at the moment of the problem there was a Heroku outage

Result

TIL¹ apparently whatthecommit is hosted on Heroku.

TIL² it is not smart to temper your setup with funny stuff (note to self: you are a developer, not a comedian).

TIL³ you can pass an option to curl to set a timeout (curl --max-time 1 <url> where the number is in seconds).

TIL⁴ the default timeout value for curl is 2 minutes.

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