It's complicated.

As you have not provided any details on version, nor stations - only a
general answer can be given. In any case this is my opinion - there is
nothing certain but some specific instances can be examined and maybe
fixed.

Network connection from LMS to station has many layers (e.g. LMS, Perl,
OS, NIC, Router, ISP, CDN, Server farm, Station, security) and each one
can have a cache or some sort of "memory". So a network problem can
persist because the cache is returning an "old " error and not bothering
doing a complete request.

Caching has been around for a long time. On telephone networks if you
call a number and it fails (e.g. engaged) and you call the number
immediately afterward the exchange can be programmed, if time interval
is too short, to not retry the call but return last failed tone  - this
is to avoid overload of network.

In the case of network connections, resetting a system (e.g. LMS,
Picore, Router) breaks the associations at various levels and so some of
the caches are cleared.  This is often the reason why something works if
you leave it alone overnight or for a period of time.

wget or curl just start, run and then stop - no point to caching within
the application also at an OS level - the process will change for each
so caching will be minimal (e.g maybe DNS) and so forth.

LMS is unlike simple applications like VLC, wget, curl etc. in that it
stays up & running often for hours, days, week non stop. it is also
single threaded and has to handle many players which will be accessing
many of the same sources (e.g. Tune-in, Spotify, MAI). So it has lots of
measure to improve performance main one is caches. Caches have a maximum
size and also expiry times.  Entries can be "refreshed" and expiry times
reset.

If a connection attempt fails, then LMS will cache the result (unless
told not ot cache) and return the errors until the cache expires.  I
think sometimes, if the user retries often,  they get the cached failed
response so a connection will remain "fail" for a period of time even
though the initial "fail" problem may have been transient.

In your specific case - "connection timeout" there may be other issues
making things worse.  In the last 12 month this error has become very
closely associated with https connection problems. The best https
support is on latest system.  LMS http support was improved from 7.9.4
but mainly 8.0 & 8.1 IIRC even small changes up to onwards up to 8.1.2.

LMS relies on SSL/TLS support from the OS so if the underlying OS is not
up to date then for example the latest TLS level may not available to
LMS and some station require it.

Most stations use CDNs/server farms to handle network traffic and there
has been cases where some CDN nodes/servers requires https whereas other
did not - for the same station so depending on load balancing a https
connection may or may not be required.

There are also some cases where some stations refuse LMS request yet
work OK on other players. I know of one such instance where LMS uses a
UA string for HTTP requests which identifies it as "iTunes" but an old
version and so the station rejects LMS requests based on the UA string.
I think a recent "mixcloud" plugin issue also had similar problem.

So without specific information on versions and problem URL - it is not
possible to say whether your problem is generic or whether there are
some instances which can be fixed.


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