Timeout

A timeout is a time limit placed on an operation. If the operation doesn’t finish within that limit, the system cancels it and treats the attempt as a failure. Timeouts prevent your application from waiting indefinitely for a response that may never arrive.

Types of Timeouts

Why Timeouts Matter

Without timeouts, a single slow dependency can cascade through your system:

• Connections pile up, exhausting your connection pool
• Memory usage grows as pending requests accumulate
• Upstream callers start timing out too, causing a chain reaction
• Eventually your entire service becomes unresponsive

Timeouts in AsyncQueue

When creating a task, you can set a timeout for how long AsyncQueue should wait for your callback endpoint to respond:

await aq.tasks.create({
  callbackUrl: 'https://your-app.com/api/generate-report',
  payload: { reportId: 'rpt_123' },
  timeout: 120,    // allow up to 2 minutes
  retries: 2,      // retry if it times out
});

If your endpoint doesn’t respond within the timeout, AsyncQueue marks the attempt as failed and triggers a retry when configured.

Best Practices

• Always set timeouts on outbound HTTP calls — never let fetch or axios wait forever
• Set task timeouts based on measured p99 durations — add a buffer but don’t be overly generous
• Use shorter timeouts for user-facing requests and longer timeouts for background tasks
• Combine timeouts with retries — a single timeout doesn’t mean permanent failure

Related Terms

• Retry
• Exponential Backoff
• Task Queue