python socket.gethostbyaddr() -- reduce timeout?

Question

socket.gethostbyname() works great when its argument is a real hostname. But when it's a nonexistent host, I get a 3 second timeout followed by

socket.gaierror: [Errno 11001] getaddrinfo failed

I don't mind the exception (it's appropriate), but is there any way to reduce the timeout?

Answer 1

This can be impossible if Python uses system gethostbyname(). I'm not sure you really want this because you can receive false timeouts.

Once I had a similar problem, but from C++: I had to call the function for large number of names, so long timeout was a real pain. A solution was to call it from many threads in parallel, so while some of them was stuck waiting for timeout, all others were proceeding fine.

Answer 2

A simple solution after going through this would be:

import socket
socket.setdefaulttimeout(5) #Default this is 30
socket.gethostbyname(your_url)