Timeouts

Linkerd can be configured with timeouts to limit the maximum amount of time on a request before aborting.

Timeouts are a client-side behavior, and are therefore performed by the outbound side of the Linkerd proxy.¹ Note that timeouts configured in this way are not retryable – if these timeouts are reached, the request will not be retried. Retryable timeouts can be configured as part of retry configuration.

Configuring Timeouts

Timeous are configured by a set of annotations which can be set on a Kubernetes Service resource or on a HTTPRoute or GRPCRoute which has a Service as a parent. Client proxies will then fail requests to that Service or route once they exceed the timeout. If any timeout configuration annotations are present on a route resource, they override all timeout configuration annotations on the parent Service.

• timeout.linkerd.io/request: The maximum amount of time a full request-response stream is in flight.
• timeout.linkerd.io/response: The maximum amount of time a backend response may be in-flight.
• timeout.linkerd.io/idle: The maximum amount of time a stream may be idle, regardless of its state.

If the request timeout field is set on an HTTPRoute resource, it will be used as the timeout.linkerd.io/request timeout. However, if both the field and the annotation are specified, the annotation will take priority.

Examples

kind: HTTPRoute
apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1beta1
metadata:
  name: schlep-default
  namespace: schlep
  annotations:
    timeout.linkerd.io/request: 2s
    timeout.linkerd.io/response: 1s
spec:
  parentRefs:
    - name: schlep
      kind: Service
      group: core
      port: 80
  rules:
    - matches:
        - path:
            type: PathPrefix
            value: "/"