Python: Increasing the Timeouts for urlfetch in Google App Engine

Google App Engine provides a function, google.appengine.api.urlfetch.fetch, for fetching URLs. I do believe all the other HTTP client libraries are monkey patched to make use of that function, which is written to take advantage of various Google infrastructure. The fetch function has a default timeout of 5 seconds. You can set a higher timeout by passing a deadline parameter, but the maximum is 10 seconds. Unfortunately, passing a deadline keyword parameter is often difficult if it's a third-party library that is making the call to fetch, for instance if you're using the GData client library.

I looked for a way to set the deadline parameter in a more global way, but I couldn't fine one by mere inspection of the code. I came up with the following HACK in order to work around this problem:

# HACK: Monkeypatch google.appengine.api.urlfetch.fetch to increase the
# deadline.  This is used by the various client libraries.
def _fetch(*args, **kargs):
  from google.appengine.api.urlfetch import _orig_fetch  # Import late.
  kargs["deadline"] = 10
  return _orig_fetch(*args, **kargs)
_fetch.this_is_the_wrapper = True

# HACK: Because of the way the dev app server works when reloading code,
# things are a little tricky here.
from google.appengine.api import urlfetch
if not hasattr(urlfetch.fetch, "this_is_the_wrapper"):
  urlfetch._orig_fetch = urlfetch.fetch
  urlfetch.fetch = _fetch
else:
  assert hasattr(urlfetch, "_orig_fetch")