Increase the idle time after connection is established in Flutter

Question

1. If a connection is established, it will be closed after 15 seconds (if I am wrong please let me know the connection closing time), and the idle time cannot be extended. In my situation, multiple requests are made to the same domain and require a persistent connection, meaning the connection should be maintained even after 15 seconds. Is there another property that can be used to achieve this?

2. Prior to establishing a connection, if multiple requests are made, each request takes time to establish a connection. Is there a way to avoid this and reduce the time taken for all requests? For instance, in the screenshot below, 4 requests are made to the same domain before the connection is established, and each request takes around 2 seconds to establish a connection. Is there a way to decrease this time?

Note: I tried using http and http_client_helper packages

3. But in some cases, when a request is raised within 15 seconds of the connection established, again the connection is re-establishing, please provide some suggestions on this. Below is my code snippet using http_client_helper.

   

Update 1

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Answer 1

Setting a timeout on the response which is a Future can help you do that. So you can have something like

final Response response = await HttpClientHelper(...).timeout(const Duration(seconds: 20));

This linked answer gives more details about handling timeout for connection and per requests. Let me know if it answers your question.

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Update

As Dharanidharan pointed out, the above suggestion lets you handle the time needed to establish a connection. To manage the idleTime after connection has been established, we need to use the HttpClient class. This gives us access to low-level functionalities:

Note: HttpClient provides low-level HTTP functionality. We recommend users start with more developer-friendly and composable APIs found in package:http.

As OP stated about the idleTimeout duration, The default value is 15 seconds. But using the idleTimeout property of the HttpClient class allows us the chance to modify this value.

  HttpClient client = HttpClient();

  Future<String> get(String url) async {
    String responseJson;

    try {
      client.idleTimeout = const Duration(minutes: 5);

      // first future
      // make a request to the url
      HttpClientRequest request = await client.getUrl(Uri.parse(baseUrl + url));

      // second future
      // close the request to get the response data
      HttpClientResponse response = await request.close();

      // Process the response stream from the request
      final stringData = await response.transform(utf8.decoder).join();

      // Manage the processed response
      responseJson = _response(stringData);
    } on SocketException {
      throw FetchDataException('');
    } on ClientException {
      throw FetchDataException('');
    } catch (e) {
      setState(() {
        responseJson = e.toString();
      });
    }

    return responseJson;
  }

The above solution changes the idleTimeout from the default 15 seconds to 5 minutes. You may read more on Making a simple GET request to know the different ways to interact with the Helper class.

Here is a full code sample on Dartpad for anyone who wants a quick build test. (May not work directly in Dartpad because of import issues).