Maybe the best solution would be to check whether any new images were downloaded, and if not, pause quieries for a while; but that seems difficult to implement.

if( cant-get-data ) {
// dont bother asking for an hour
}

if the question still stands (I haven’t used the foreign repo feature since then, so I don’t know if this is still an issue): what happens is that the call times out, and the page shows red links and php error messages saying the thumbs/ file cannot be read. The actual file is thumbs// so I’m guessing empty string are getting cached for the file sizes. If caching could be simply aborted when Http::get returns empty, that would solve the problem. (OTOH this would mean that the site would make calls to the foreign repo on every page load. This is a good thing when the problem is that Commons is overloaded or the connection is too slow so the site can get a few images on every call but not a hundred at the same time; but it is unneccessary extra traffic when there is some permanent error, and the “cant download” status actually should get cached.)

I see what you’re saying. Unfortunately, the Http (from which I am using the get() method) class doesn’t handle timeouts (in general) well at all. It just fails to return data, after timing out.

Not to mention, if you don’t have cURL, it will attempt to get the data via file_get_contents(), which is almost certain to fail.

Thoughts?