https://vacua.dev/tags/timeouts/Recent content in Timeouts on Brian FaustHugoen-USMon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://vacua.dev/thoughts/a-timeout-is-part-of-the-contract/Fri, 01 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://vacua.dev/thoughts/a-timeout-is-part-of-the-contract/<p>One remote accounting service would disappear for long periods and sometimes return with an expired TLS certificate. Another integration scheduled maintenance during peak operating hours. Work which normally completed quickly could occupy application capacity while the dependency was unable to help.</p> <p>A timeout would not have made either provider reliable. It would have answered a question our callers still needed answered:</p> <figure class="code-figure"> <div class="code-block" data-copy-code> <button class="copy-code" type="button" aria-label="Copy code">copy</button><div class="highlight"><pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code class="language-text" data-lang="text"><span class="line"><span class="cl">How long may this attempt wait before its result is no longer useful?</span></span></code></pre></div> </div> </figure> <p>That answer belongs to the operation&rsquo;s contract. Leaving it to a client library&rsquo;s default lets a transport decide how much of the customer&rsquo;s time and our worker capacity one dependency may consume.</p>