Best practices for web service timeouts
It there any article/book that defines upper bounded design limits for WS timeouts? Do you timeout at the server or recommend the client specific timeouts too?
Is there a common best practice like "never design WS that can take longer than 60 seconds, use an asynchronous token pattern"
I am interested in knowing what you do or your opinion too.
Answer
This stuff about 30+ second timeouts is ridiculous advice, IMO. Your timeouts should be about 3 seconds. Yes. Three. The number after two and before four. If you're building an application based on a SOA, then DEFINITELY 3 seconds, or less.
Think about it... the user of your app expects a TOTAL response time of about five seconds or less (preferably about three). If EACH INDIVIDUAL SERVICE CALL is taking more than a couple of* milliseconds* to return, you're hosed. Waiting 30+ seconds for ONE service to return is an eternity. The user will never wait around that long. Plus, if you know they're supposed to return in the sub-one second range, what's the point of waiting for another 30 or more seconds to signal an error condition; it's not going to magically work where when it didn't 28 seconds ago. If your application has wild swings in average response time from sub-one second to over 30 seconds, something was designed incorrectly. You might think about some caching or something.