The issue was never resolved. I had to try HTTP posting to the server, and if it failed twice, then I just deemed the server dead for the remainder of the application's lifetime.
Not ideal at all, but was good enough for my purpose. I hope it gets resolved!

Hi all, I'm using esp_http_client to make requests to a server. However, when the server is down, the http request is blocking the rest of the task for a very long time. I want to make it so that if the server is offline and the client can't post, it should immediately stop. Is this possible to do? ...