How to extend network timeout for specific PHP call

Are you referring to a TCP timeout or an HTTP keep-alive header?

I'm not sure to be honest. In Nginx it's referred to as the keep alive timeout. However, after further research, this seems to translate to the idle tcp timeout, as that seems to be at 300 seconds.

Landono, whilst the TCP idle timeout can play a part if it's shorter than the HTTP keepalive idle timeout, there isn't a direct relationship between it and the HTTP keepalive. If you drop the TCP keepalive to 2m and increase the HTTP keepalive to 5m, the lower of the two figures will apply.

You'll need to keep the TCP timeout to 5m/300s if you will use a 5m HTTP keepalive anywhere. I don't think the TCP value can be changed in an iRule unfortunately.

As the HTTP keepalive timeout is not negotiated between client and server, there's nothing an iRule can do to change this for a specific URL, this is something you need to configure on nginx. I'm only familiar with Apache but with that, you could globally increase the PHP specific timeout value.

I believe you should be able to use the IP::idle_timeout command:

https://devcentral.f5.com/articles/investigating-the-ltm-tcp-profile-max-syn-retransmissions-amp-idle-timeout.UkqwLT-K7wQ

https://devcentral.f5.com/wiki/iRules.IP__idle_timeout.ashx

So something like this:

when HTTP_REQUEST {
    if { [string tolower [HTTP::uri]] starts_with "/longcall.php" } {
        IP::idle_timeout 300
        set update_server_idle 1
    }
}
when SERVER_CONNECTED {
    if { [info exists update_server_idle] } {
        IP::idle_timeout 300
    }
}

For web servers, we actually use Apache. We used Nginx just as loadbalancers, to front the traffic to the Apache webservers. There currently isn't any configuration on the webservers about keep alives, this has always been handled by the load balancers. Thank you Kevin for the script, I'll try that out and let you know how it goes.