I have two installs of WP running on two identically-equipped Lunarpages hosts. When I went to apply today’s 2.8.4 upgrade, one install gave me the error, the other did not. I decided to finally figure this out for good.
The problem for me is caused by lines 1276-1277 of the WP_Http_Curl request() method in wp-includes/http.php. I commented those lines out and threw in a line of debug code on line 1325 (after the curl_exec call)
print_r(curl_getinfo($handle));
and tested the cURL transport using Core Control. I found that my requests were simply taking longer than the timeout. I don’t know quite why that would be, except to guess that the shared server of my one install must be really swamped.
I fixed it by building myself a little plugin that adds an action for the 'http_api_curl' action called on line 1315.
After enabling this fix, WP showed the 2.8.4 upgrade button on the Dashboard page, but the WordPress Development Blog and Plugins sections still showed timeout errors. So, I also looked further and added a filter to my plugin hack to catch and modify $r['timeout'] in the WP_Http request() method on line 237.
Here’s is my plugin code, which overrides all timeouts to a massive 15 seconds:
//adjustments to wp-includes/http.php timeout values to workaround slow server responses
add_filter('http_request_args', 'bal_http_request_args', 100, 1);
function bal_http_request_args($r) //called on line 237
{
$r['timeout'] = 15;
return $r;
}
add_action('http_api_curl', 'bal_http_api_curl', 100, 1);
function bal_http_api_curl($handle) //called on line 1315
{
curl_setopt( $handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 15 );
curl_setopt( $handle, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 15 );
}
I recommend you make sure this does not cause any other issues for your WP install. If you know how to make this code into a plugin, then you are capable enuf to be responsible for any adverse fallout. ?? I only know this solved my immediate problem while still maintaining cURL functionality.
