API Timeout Recommendation: Enhancing Resilience and Reliability

To ensure the utmost robustness and prevent premature disconnections during API interactions, we strongly recommend configuring your client-side timeouts to 30 seconds.

This recommended threshold is designed to provide a comprehensive buffer, accounting for a variety of factors that can influence API call completion:

• Network Layer Considerations: This duration allows for inherent network variability, including:

  • Latency: Time delays caused by geographical distance between your client and our servers, DNS resolution, and routing through various internet hops.
  • Congestion: Temporary increases in network traffic that can slow down data transmission.
  • Connection Setup: Time required for TCP handshakes and secure TLS negotiations.
  • Packet Loss/Retransmission: Brief, transient network issues that may necessitate re-sending data packets.

• Application-Side Processing and Fault Tolerance: It accommodates the full lifecycle of an API request on our end, even when our systems are operating under designed fault-tolerant conditions:

  • Internal Processing: Time required for complex operations, database queries, and interactions with multiple internal or third-party services.
  • Asynchronous Operations & Queuing: If an operation involves asynchronous processing or queuing to optimize resource usage and improve overall system throughput, it might introduce a slight, intentional delay before a final response is ready.
  • Transient Failures & Retries: Our systems are designed with internal retry mechanisms to handle transient failures (e.g., temporary database contention or microservice unresponsiveness). The 30-second timeout allows sufficient time for these internal retries to complete, ensuring a higher success rate for your requests.

Important Note: This 30-second timeout represents a maximum, fail-safe duration and is not indicative of typical performance. Our infrastructure is optimized for speed, and the vast majority of API calls complete successfully in a fraction of this time – often within milliseconds or just a few seconds.

Why this Recommendation is Crucial:

Setting an adequate timeout value is vital for maintaining the consistency and reliability of your integration:

• Prevents Premature Disconnections: It ensures your client applications do not prematurely abandon a request that is still being actively processed on our servers.
• Avoids Inconsistent States: By waiting for the full 30 seconds, you significantly reduce the risk of your system incorrectly concluding a transaction has failed when it may have, in fact, succeeded on our end. This prevents scenarios like duplicate transaction attempts or incorrect status updates in your internal records.
• Maximizes Successful Outcomes: Allowing sufficient time for our systems to complete their internal processing and potential retries means you are more likely to receive a successful response, even during brief periods of elevated load or network instability.

We highly recommend implementing this timeout setting to enhance the stability and resilience of your integration with our API services.