CFHTTP request to YouTube return 408 Request Time-out errors

Report · Sep 27, 2023

I am using CFHTTP to test for broken links. For some reason all youtube links return 408 Request Time-out error. Simply increasing the timeout value does not make any difference. Some other servers show the same behaviour.

Is there anything I can do to make it correctly detect if the link is OK? Maybe it requires a specific header to be sent with the request?

Here is the function I use:

<cffunction name="checkLink" access="remote" returnType="struct" returnFormat="json" output="no">
    <cfargument name="link" type="string">
    <cfset ret = structNew()>
    <cfhttp url="#link#" method="head" timeout="1">
    <cfset ret["code"] = cfhttp.statusCode>
    <cfset ret["detail"] = cfhttp.errorDetail>
    <cfreturn ret>
</cffunction>

These are some of the links that return the error:

Thank you!

Report · Sep 30, 2023

I don't know why CFHTTP would get that error, but I would compare the request and response headers from CFHTTP to something else you know works (wget, curl). Because this is encrypted with TLS (HTTPS), you'll need to use a proxy that will let you get access to all the requests and responses. Fiddler will let you do that, and I think you can get a free or trial version still.

https://www.telerik.com/fiddler

If you have to use a trial version, be prepared for nonstop sales calls.

Dave Watts, Eidolon LLC