{
  "id": 17861200,
  "title": "The Timeout Math That Breaks Your Retry Loop",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/11/02/the-timeout-math-that-breaks-your-retry-loop",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-11-02T21:59:02.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/robust_true_try/the-timeout-math-that-breaks-your-retry-loop-4all"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": null,
  "summary": "The article discusses the issue of per-attempt timeouts in retry loops and how they can lead to exceeding a caller's deadline. It explains that a timeout on a single HTTP attempt only bounds one connection and does not take into account the total time of the operation. The author introduces a method to budget the deadline across attempts, starting from the total time the caller is willing to spend and dividing it among the attempts. This approach ensures that the timeout for each attempt is capped by the remaining budget, preventing any single attempt from outliving the caller's deadline. The article also emphasizes the importance of propagating the deadline down the call stack, so that each layer of the system knows the remaining time for its operations.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}