Alright, so today I’m diving into something that tripped me up a bit recently: administrative timeouts. Let me walk you through what I did, how I screwed up, and how I (finally) figured it out.
It all started when I was messing around with a new service. We were trying to implement a system where, if a particular task took too long, we’d automatically cancel it. Seemed straightforward enough, right?
First thing I did was slap together some code that looked roughly like this:
// Rough pseudo-code, don't @ me
function doTheThing() {
setTimeout(() => {
// Check if the thing is done
if (!isThingDone()) {
// Kill it with fire!
cancelTheThing();
*("Administrative timeout triggered!");
}, TIMEOUT_DURATION);
startTheThing();
I set a `TIMEOUT_DURATION`, fired off the `startTheThing()` function, and figured that `setTimeout` would handle the rest. Easy peasy. I deployed it, and… nothing. Or rather, things went horribly wrong.
Turns out, the timeout _was_ triggering, but the `cancelTheThing()` function wasn’t actually cancelling the thing! I was getting flooded with “Administrative timeout triggered!” messages, but the long-running tasks kept chugging along, eating up resources and generally causing chaos.
So, I started digging. The first thing I realized was that my `cancelTheThing()` function was… well, kinda weak. It was trying to signal another part of the system to stop, but there was no guarantee that the signal would be received or acted upon in a timely manner. It was like shouting “Stop!” into a crowded room and hoping someone would listen.
Then I did a lot of googling, staring at Stack Overflow, and generally feeling like an idiot. What I finally realized was that I needed a more robust way to manage these tasks and their timeouts. Something that gave me more direct control.
I ended up refactoring the whole thing to use promises and `*()`. Here’s a simplified version of what I did:
Okay, so what’s going on here? `startTheThingPromise()` is now an asynchronous function that returns a promise. `*()` takes an array of promises and resolves or rejects as soon as _any_ of those promises resolves or rejects. This means I’m racing the actual task against a timeout promise.
The timeout promise is simply a `setTimeout` that rejects after `TIMEOUT_DURATION`. If `startTheThingPromise()` takes too long, the timeout promise rejects first, and the `catch` block gets executed. Crucially, within the `catch` block, I can now reliably handle the timeout situation – logging the error, retrying the task, or whatever else I need to do.
The key takeaway for me was that a simple `setTimeout` and a hope that things will cancel isn’t enough. You need a reliable mechanism for enforcing the timeout and handling the consequences when it triggers. Using promises and `*()` gave me that control. It was a bit of a pain to refactor, but it made the whole system much more robust and predictable.
So, yeah, that’s my adventure with administrative timeouts. Hopefully, this helps someone else avoid the same mistakes I did!
