Is there any chance that you're writing a client script? In that case, you can use native web browser APIs.
Otherwise, unfortunately the answer is no. If this fits your business process, you might consider calling nlapiRequestURL in a try/catch block and retrying x number of times on time-outs. The alternative would be redesigning your process to be async.
nameunknown01 replied on 04/22/2017, 02:37 AM: unfortunately its server side,so im limited to nlapiRequestURL, Ive only seen it occur twice now on several hundred requests, so the scale of the issue is quite minor as NS generates the error alerts and i can inspect which record is the problem