regarding the timeout I am writing down my findings for future reference.

Internally AFNetworking library uses [NSURLConnection] and [NSURLRequest] objects for performing http communications.
[NSURLRequest] has the option to set the timeout interval for an http request.

This option is honoured both in iOS 5 and iOS 6. But there are some differences.

In iOS 5, setting a timeout on POST and PUT requests with a value less than 240 secs, is ignored by the underlying runtime(where it defaults to 240). For GET and DELETE requests, the timeout is honoured all the time.

In contrast iOS 6 honours the timeout, for all http operations.

Here are is the link discussing the issue in the official apple dev forum:
https://devforums.apple.com/thread/25282?start=0&tstart=0

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