In telecommunications and related engineering (including computer networking and programming), the term timeout or time-out has several meanings, including: Timeouts allow for more efficient usage of limited resources without requiring additional interaction from the agent interested in the goods that cause the consumption of these resources.

The basic idea is that in situations where a system must wait for something to happen, rather than waiting indefinitely, the waiting will be aborted after the timeout period has elapsed.

This is based on the assumption that further waiting is useless, and some other action is necessary.

Balancing timeout values in distributed systems and microservices can be tricky: short timeout values can fail healthy requests prematurely, leading to complex workarounds, while long timeout values can result in slow error responses and poor user experiences.

The circuit breaker design pattern can be a better alternative, as it can monitor service health, detect failures dynamically and faster, and improve the user experience.