Jira gadgets and macros timeout after 5 seconds in Confluence

Summary

When a JIRA gadget (3rd party or an Atlassian gadget) is loaded in Confluence 6 users receive the error "There was error when performing your request. Please retry or go to other page." if the gadget retrieval takes over 5 seconds to load.

Environment

Confluence 6.X

Steps to Reproduce

1. Connect Confluence 6.X to JIRA.
2. Create a new page and add a JIRA gadget on the page.
3. Navigate to the newly created page.

Expected Results

The gadget always loads when the page is viewed.

The gadget/macro will respect the timeouts listed in General Configuration -> Connection Timeouts

Actual Results

The page loads but the gadget displays the error "There was error when performing your request. Please retry or go to other page."

This will only happen if it takes over 5 seconds to retrieve the gadget. Many customers have pages that can take over 5 seconds to load when fetching gadgets from JIRA.

Notes

The default socket timeout has been reduced from 15 seconds in Confluence 5.10.8 to 5 seconds in Confluence 6.X, even though the intent of HttpTimeoutsProvider was to provide a 15 second socket timeout. Under Confluence 6, the same method in HttpClientFetcher requests the configured connection timeout and accidentally sets that connection timeout as the socket timeout.

Workaround

Add the JVM parameter:

-Datlassian.http.connection.timeout=xxxx

.
If you're running Confluence Data Center, please do ensure to add this parameter in all of your Confluence nodes.