Glossary
Agent Timeout
A maximum time limit for agent operations, after which execution is terminated to prevent indefinite resource consumption or user experience degradation.
What is Agent Timeout?
Timeouts protect against hung processes, infinite loops, and excessive latency that degrades user experience. Different timeout values apply to various operation types based on expected duration and criticality. When timeouts occur, agents should clean up gracefully and return meaningful error information.
Timeout configuration requires understanding normal operation duration distributions and acceptable tail latencies. Too-short timeouts cause false failures during legitimate processing, while too-long timeouts waste resources and frustrate users.
Example
A document analysis agent has a 30-second timeout for processing, with 95% of documents completing in under 10 seconds, ensuring users get responses or clear errors rather than indefinite waiting.
How Signet addresses this
Signet tracks timeout rates as performance metrics, with excessive timeouts indicating capacity or efficiency issues. Agents declare expected response times, enabling consumers to set appropriate timeout expectations.
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