Reading data from R times out

Question

I am reading data in R from the server but the connection times out and the data is not read in.

Error in open.connection(3L, "rb") : cannot open the connection In addition: Warning message: Failed to open 'https://www.soscisurvey.de/polentometro/?act=Pep<snip>': Connection timed out after 10003 milliseconds

I am using R version 4.5.0 from within R Studio Version 2024.12.1+563 (2024.12.1+563) on macOS 15.4.1 (24E263).

Answer 1

I assume this used to be a temporary issue, maybe the server had to write a lot of interviews in the database at that time. I just tried the link from your code (and then removed the secret part of the code that let everybody download your data), and it worked immediately. Does ist work by now? If not, please what happens when you enter the http://... part or the code in the browser address line. If that works but R not, then it's possibly issue of R being blocked from Internet access.

Comments

Thanks for checking! If I use the link in the browser it works, but not if I use it in R. I tried with a different data (stored on GH) and that worked fine so it seems to be a problem with SosciSurvey specifically.

---

I was investigating this further and it looks as if the issue is with my ISP. They are throttling non-browser connections. So I consider this to be solved from a SosciSurvey perspective

---

Sounds a bit nasty, but actually I wonder if the ISP can detect the difference between a browser and R connecting via HTTPS. As this is encrypted, it should look the same from the outside.

Don't worry. Even if you cannot import the data via 1-click (for whatever reasons), downloading the script plus data in the R tab should not take much longer. You may also want and try update RStudio and R. Just in case.