Any appender which accesses a remote service needs to deal with the unavailability of the said service. The fact that Twitter4J did not honor the setHttpConnectionTimeout() method is a useful fact to know. On the other hand, I don't think there is much TwitterAppender can do in order to compensate for Twitter4J's present shortcomings. Filing a bug report against Twitter4J or contacting Twitter4J developpers (as Rob has done) is the reasonable thing to do. Anyway, thank you for keeping us posted. Joern Huxhorn wrote:

Hi all.

Twitter is more or less down for hours now. This sucks but also shows a problem we need to be aware of while implementing the appender:

Begin forwarded message:

...

*From: *"Rob O'Brien" <rob@zepoid.com <mailto:rob@zepoid.com>> *Date: *6. August 2009 17:13:31 MESZ *To: *<twitter4j@googlegroups.com <mailto:twitter4j@googlegroups.com>> *Subject: **[Twitter4J] Request Timeouts* *Reply-To: *twitter4j@googlegroups.com <mailto:twitter4j@googlegroups.com>

I’m brand new to the group, so forgive me if this topic has been covered (I did a quick search and found nothing).

With Twitter being down this morning, requests to Twitter through Twitter4J seem to hang indefinitely. Even with the use of setHttpConnectionTimeout(), requests took longer than the value I set (which was 5000, or 5 seconds – requests still took up to 30 seconds)

Can someone verify that the timeout enforcement works and that this is the correct setting to prevent such hangs while Twitter is unavailable?

**Rob O'Brien*** **Web Application Developer & Consultant** **rob@zepoid.com <mailto:rob@zepoid.com>**

*

In addition, I've found another problem myself for which I filed a bug report: http://yusuke.homeip.net/jira/browse/TFJ-193 Currently, Twitter4J isn't sending status updates in UTF-8 - which it should. I've also described a workaround in the JIRA ticket.

Just FYI.

Joern.

-- Ceki Gülcü Logback: The reliable, generic, fast and flexible logging framework for Java. http://logback.qos.ch