Backend & systems·Resilience and failure handling
you give up on the call after two seconds instead of holding the thread open until the other side eventually answers or does not.
Timeout
A bound on how long you will wait for an operation. It is the most under-set value in most codebases: many clients default to no timeout at all, which converts a slow dependency into an exhausted connection pool and a full outage. Every network call needs one, and it should be smaller than the caller's own deadline.