Frontend and Backends Timeouts

Summary

This video delves into the concept of timeouts in backend systems, explaining their critical role in managing resources and preventing denial-of-service attacks. The speaker outlines five key types of timeouts: connection timeout, request read timeout, wait timeout, processing timeout, and response timeout. Each type is essential for handling various stages of a request in backend processing. The video also discusses the impact of timeouts in client-server and proxy configurations, along with strategies to avoid resource exhaustion and ensure system stability.

Takeaways

• ⏳ Timeouts are mechanisms to stop waiting for a resource or action after a specific time limit, often to free up resources or avoid denial of service attacks.
• 🖥️ Connection timeout occurs when a client is unable to establish a connection with a server in a specified time, often happening during the TCP handshake process.
• 📩 Read timeout happens when the backend takes too long to read a client's request, which can be exploited by slow requests, such as in slowloris attacks.
• ⏱️ Wait timeout refers to how long a request waits in a queue before being processed by a server thread or process, used for better load management.
• 🧮 Processing timeout limits how long a backend can process a request before terminating it, often used for long-running database queries or complex calculations.
• 💡 Response timeout is the duration a client waits for a server's response after sending a request, essential for synchronous operations.
• 🔒 Connection closure doesn't always terminate ongoing requests on the server side; additional logic is needed to handle cancellation properly.
• 🌐 CDNs and reverse proxies also handle timeouts, including connection, read, and response timeouts, which can return errors like 'Gateway Timeout'.
• ⚠️ Retrying failed requests without proper timeout handling can lead to overload issues, such as the Thundering Herd problem, seen in Amazon's 2020 outage.
• 🛠️ Timeout configurations can help detect slow operations, prevent system overloads, and protect resources from malicious or unintended excessive usage.

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