In an architecturally resilient system, timeouts play a crucial role in ensuring that the system can recover from failures or disruptions. Timeouts are essentially limits set on how long a system should wait for a response or activity to occur before considering it a failure or timeout event.
By setting timeouts, the system can detect and handle failures quickly and proactively, rather than waiting indefinitely for a response and potentially causing downstream issues. Timeouts can also prevent a single point of failure from causing cascading failures throughout the system by setting limits on how long various components wait for each other to respond.
Moreover, timeouts can help prevent resource exhaustion issues, such as an overloaded system going into a "death spiral" where it becomes less and less responsive as it tries to handle too many requests at once. By placing limits on how long processes can use resources, timeouts can help keep the system stable and prevent it from becoming overwhelmed.
Overall, timeouts are an important tool for architecturally resilient systems in ensuring the system remains stable, responsive, and able to handle disruptions or failures gracefully.
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