CometD and Opera

The Opera browser is working well with the CometD JavaScript library.
However, recently a problem was reported by the BlastChat guys: with Opera, long-polling requests were strangely disconnecting and immediately reconnecting. This problem was only happening if the long poll request was held by the CometD server for the whole duration of the long-polling timeout.
Reducing the long-polling timeout from the default 30 seconds to 20 seconds made the problem disappear.
This made me think that some other entity had a 30 seconds timeout, and it was killing the request just before it had the chance to be responded by the CometD server.
Such entities may be front-end web servers (such as when Apache Httpd is deployed in front of the CometD server), as well as firewalls or other network components.
But in this case, all other major browsers were working fine, only Opera was failing.
So I typed about:config in Opera’s address bar to access Opera’s configuration options, and filtered with the keyword timeout in the “Quick find” text field.
The second entry is “HTTP Loading Delayed Timeout” and it is set at 30 seconds.
Increasing that value to 45 seconds made the problem disappear.
In my opinion, that value is a bit too aggressive, especially these days where Comet techniques are commonly used and where WebSocket is not yet widely deployed.
The simple workaround is to set the CometD long poll timeout to 20-25 seconds as explained here, but it would be great if Opera’s default was set to a bigger value.