HTTP and HTTPS transfers over unreliable networks can remain stuck for long periods when remote servers, proxies, or network paths fail in subtle ways, causing automation and interactive sessions to stall. Explicit timeouts in wget prevent jobs from hanging indefinitely and allow monitoring systems to react when downloads stop making progress. Consistent timeout behaviour is especially important in batch jobs, configuration management tools, and container entrypoints that depend on predictable failure modes.

The wget client exposes multiple timers for network operations, including DNS resolution, TCP connection establishment, and idle time between received data blocks. Command-line options such as –timeout, –connect-timeout, and –read-timeout adjust these limits per invocation, while configuration directives in /home/$USER/.wgetrc provide persistent defaults. Combining specific per-command flags with sane configuration values yields a flexible baseline that adapts to links of different quality without changing scripts for every call.

Timeouts that are too aggressive cause intermittent failures on high-latency or congested networks, while overly generous limits leave processes waiting for endpoints that are effectively unreachable. Selecting values that match real-world conditions for the environment reduces false alarms without hiding genuine outages. Before tightening settings in production, testing with representative services and paths helps confirm that chosen thresholds handle transient slowdowns without masking persistent problems.

Related: How to retry downloads automatically using wget
Related: How to debug wget connections

Steps to set connection and read timeouts in wget:

  1. Open a terminal on Linux with a regular user shell. 
    $ whoami
user

    Wget reads user-specific defaults from /home/$USER/.wgetrc, so a non-root shell keeps timeout configuration scoped to that account.

  2. Display the timeout-related options supported by wget to understand the available controls. 
    $ wget --help | grep -i timeout
  -T,  --timeout=SECONDS           set all timeout values to SECONDS
       --dns-timeout=SECS          set the DNS lookup timeout to SECS
       --connect-timeout=SECS      set the connect timeout to SECS
       --read-timeout=SECS         set the read timeout to SECS

    The generic –timeout option caps overall waiting time for DNS, connection, and read operations unless more specific per-phase timeouts are provided.

  3. Run a download with a combined network timeout using –timeout to cap all network operations for a single invocation. 
    $ wget --timeout=20 https://www.example.com/archive.tar.gz
--2026-01-10 05:43:37--  https://www.example.com/archive.tar.gz
Resolving www.example.com (www.example.com)... 203.0.113.50
Connecting to www.example.com (www.example.com)|203.0.113.50|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 524288 (512K) [application/gzip]
Saving to: 'archive.tar.gz'

     0K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  9%  261M 0s
    50K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 19%  232M 0s
   100K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 29%  214M 0s
   150K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 39% 99.5M 0s
   200K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 48%  257M 0s
   250K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 58%  257M 0s
   300K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 68%  183M 0s
   350K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 78%  190M 0s
   400K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 87%  112M 0s
   450K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 97%  159M 0s
   500K .......... ..                                         100% 23.4M=0.003s

2026-01-10 05:43:37 (181 MB/s) - 'archive.tar.gz' saved [524288/524288]

    A moderate –timeout value ensures that prolonged stalls at any stage of the transfer cause a clean failure instead of an indefinitely blocked process.

  4. Run a download with separate connection and read timeouts to distinguish slow handshakes from slow data transfer. 
    $ wget --connect-timeout=5 --read-timeout=30 https://downloads.example.net/files/largefile.iso
--2026-01-10 05:43:44--  https://downloads.example.net/files/largefile.iso
Resolving downloads.example.net (downloads.example.net)... 203.0.113.50
Connecting to downloads.example.net (downloads.example.net)|203.0.113.50|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 524288 (512K) [application/x-iso9660-image]
Saving to: 'largefile.iso'

     0K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  9%  335M 0s
    50K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 19%  214M 0s
   100K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 29%  628M 0s
   150K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 39%  593M 0s
   200K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 48%  583M 0s
   250K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 58%  519M 0s
   300K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 68%  592M 0s
   350K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 78%  215M 0s
   400K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 87%  341M 0s
   450K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 97%  674M 0s
   500K .......... ..                                         100% 23.4M=0.001s

2026-01-10 05:43:44 (404 MB/s) - 'largefile.iso' saved [524288/524288]

    The –connect-timeout value limits how long establishing the TCP or TLS session can take, while –read-timeout controls the idle gap tolerated between received data chunks once the transfer has started.

  5. Add persistent timeout defaults for the current account in /home/$USER/.wgetrc so new invocations inherit the chosen values. 
    $ printf 'timeout = 20\nconnect_timeout = 5\nread_timeout = 30\n' >> ~/.wgetrc

    Timeouts that are too small for real network conditions can cause routine downloads to fail repeatedly, while excessively large values may leave unattended jobs blocked for many minutes during outages.

  6. Verify the behaviour by targeting an address that never responds and confirming that wget aborts close to the configured connection timeout instead of hanging indefinitely. 
    $ wget --tries=1 --connect-timeout=5 --read-timeout=5 http://10.255.255.1/
--2026-01-10 05:43:50--  http://10.255.255.1/
Connecting to 10.255.255.1:80... failed: Connection timed out.
Giving up.

    Consistent timeout messages and fast exit codes from scripted wget calls indicate that connection and read limits are active and preventing long-running hangs.