Hello All, This is probably more a Python question but maybe you will have a quick solution for me - I guess the greatest *multi-threaded* Python application provides the greatest basis for this problem domain :-) The situation: external method that is doing a http request using urllib2. I don't care about the response, and whether there was any response at all, I just need to send the request through - thus I want this request to time out very fast (let it be 2 seconds). I found no documented way to set the timeout for urllib2, after some googling I found an advice to manipulate the timeout on the lower-level socket module, something like this: import socket import urllib2 def do_request(): timeout = 2 socket.setdefaulttimeout(timeout) req = urllib2.Request(url='http://my.site.com/do_something_quick') response = urllib2.urlopen(req) The problem is this way this default timeout is set for _all_ new socket created by this Python process using the socket module. Even if I return the default to its previous state after the request it won't help me much - there are three more threads in my Zope that should be able to work with default timeout. So there are two possible solutions - to find a (preferably documented) way of accessing and parameterizing the socket object created by urllib2 to make a request or to find a way to isolate(??) global module settings between Zope threads. Zope 2.8.3, Python 2.4.2, FreeBSD 4.10 if this is relevant. Any hints/TFMs? Many thanks Michael