PHP SOAP client giving "Error Fetching http headers"

Summary: PHP’s SOAP client was throwing an extremely unhelpful error: Error Fetching http headers. It turns out that it was a simple case of a slow SOAP server, and increasing the defaultsockettimeout in php.ini to 120 fixed it.

Problem: My very first experience with SOAP was failing. I couldn’t figure out why one request (getVersion) worked while another (getUserList) gave the above cryptic error.

Solution: After trying in vain to get useful information out of Apache and PHP, I installed Wireshark to sniff my network traffic. I could see the response coming in just fine, but it was only when I realized that it was coming in almost 100 seconds after the request that I became suspicious. Checking my php.ini, I found that the defaultsockettimeout was set to 60 seconds. I upped it to 120 and the problem was resolved.

Discussion: I probably should have thought of a timeout earlier. It felt like a timeout, but the strange message about headers caused me to bash my head against a wall for the better part of a workday.

Using the SOAP client’s connection_timeout option in this case would most likely not work because this is not a connection timeout—the TCP connection is made just fine—but rather that the server takes too long to form its HTTP/SOAP response. This is why the call to getVersion ran without trouble while getUserList did not; getUserList had a much longer execution time on the server.

9 Comments

    • Author

      Anonymous

    • Date

      February 18, 2009

    • Time

      3:02 pm

    Thanks - tried still gives error

  2. Well it's a pretty general error. This is just what it turned out to be in my case. Have you tried using Wireshark to see what's being sent between the client and the server?

    • Author

      Andrew Metcalfe

    • Date

      May 15, 2009

    • Time

      7:47 am

    This fixed my problem. Thanks for the incredibly cryptic error PHP!

    And thanks for posting this aidan :). This one was giving me a headache because *sometimes* it would work, and sometimes it wouldn't. Apparently my soap server works faster at certain times of the day :P

    • Author

      Patricia

    • Date

      May 27, 2009

    • Time

      8:56 am

    It gave me a clue of my issue. I set that variable to 600. Thanks!

    • Author

      Jason

    • Date

      June 16, 2009

    • Time

      5:33 am

    Thanks for this post. I'm having the same error. Was this ini change made on the host SOAP server or the client machine?

  6. On the client. I only had access to the host through the SOAP connection, so couldn't adjust its timeout value.

  7. Thank you, Aidan, you saved my day!

    • Author

      Robert

    • Date

      June 22, 2011

    • Time

      5:14 am

    Thanks Aidan, it solved my problem!

    • Author

      monn

    • Date

      September 20, 2011

    • Time

      3:08 am

    if still error, try to set it as unlimited..
    fixed in my case

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