POST request being aborted after a long time

Question

My express app has a route /api/uploadSbml which expects a multipart/form type post request in which I upload a file.

Locally running, everything works fine, but when I deploy the code to a server on digital ocean, the request is aborted by the server after a solid 2 minutes.

I've tried using other uploading libraries like multer, express-fileupload all resulting in the same issue.

The route file which applies the formidable middleware:

// Route
const express = require('express')
const formidableMiddleware = require('express-formidable')
const uploadSbmlController = require('../controllers/uploadSbml')
const router = express.Router()

// Formidable middleware for uploading files
router.use(formidableMiddleware({ uploadDir: './' }))

router.post('/', uploadSbmlController)

module.exports = router

The controller file which uses the file uploaded:

// Controller
module.exports = function(req, res) {
  if (req.files.file) {
    // do stuff
  } else {
    res.status(500).send('Something went terribly wrong.')
  }
}

The error received after nearly 2 minutes at the server:

Error: Request aborted
     at IncomingMessage.<anonymous>(/usr/src/app/server/node_modules/formidable/lib/incoming_form.js:122:19)
     at IncomingMessage.emit (events.js:198:13)
     at abortIncoming (_http_server.js:448:9)
     at socketOnClose (_http_server.js:441:3)
     at Socket.emit (events.js:203:15)
     at TCP._handle.close (net.js:606:12)

Answer 1

A quick search for "express two minute timeout" reveals that Express (actually the underlying node.js HTTP module) has a default two minute timeout.

According to the current node.js documentation, this can be adjusted by calling server.timeout(<new timeout value in milliseconds>).

It sounds like the file you're uploading is large enough that, although it uploads quickly on your local network, it takes more than two minutes when uploading to the remote server.