docs: correct request-timeout claims found by adversarial review

F2: the idle timer resets on DECODED body bytes, after net/http's own
gzip decompression. A gzip'd response whose compressed bytes arrive
steadily but whose deflate stream yields nothing for the whole window
still gets aborted. The previous wording claimed a slow-but-progressing
body is always unaffected; adds a qualifying paragraph explaining the
gzip case and why fixing it (measuring wire bytes) is out of scope at
the five-minute default.

F3: reworded the "silence ends a request, never elapsed time" framing.
A streaming forwarder reads a chunk, writes it to the client, then
reads again; the write is not watched, so time blocked on a slow
client counts against the same idle window as a silent provider.
Aborting is still correct, but the log line no longer claims the
provider specifically caused it.

F5: documents that neither timeout is ever retried, and why: a
ResponseHeaderTimeout failure wraps context.DeadlineExceeded, which
Retry's own transient classification excludes; a mid-body watchdog
timeout fires after the retry mechanism has already returned.

F8: softened "Every upstream request this gateway makes" to the
routes actually covered, and added a "Federated MCP" note: the
federated /mcp endpoint's two direct calls are not wrapped by the
idle-progress watchdog, but are not unbounded either — they still get
ResponseHeaderTimeout from the shared client, plus their own 20s/120s/
5s context.WithTimeout budgets. Worst case is a bounded stall, not a
forever one.
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-23 02:55:22 +01:00
parent c811de3dfb
commit edd618279f
+50 -6
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@@ -850,9 +850,13 @@ request.
## Request timeout
Every upstream request this gateway makes — provider adapter calls, native
passthrough (`/{provider}/...`), and the MCP/A2A target proxy — is bounded
by a progress-based timeout: silence ends a request, never elapsed time.
Every provider adapter call and every native passthrough
(`/{provider}/...`) request is bounded by a progress-based timeout:
aborted once this gateway observes no upstream read progress for the
configured duration, never simply because elapsed time crossed a fixed
deadline. The MCP/A2A target proxy (`/mcp/{name}/...`, `/a2a/{name}/...`)
shares the identical mechanism. The federated `/mcp` endpoint
(`mcp_federation.go`) does **not** — see the "Federated MCP" note below.
**Behavior change for every deployment, not an invisible bug fix.** Before
this feature, an adapter's `*http.Client` set no timeout of any kind: a
@@ -873,6 +877,29 @@ request forever. Default, when neither `requestTimeout` field is set:
this reason. Non-streaming responses share the identical mechanism: a
large or slow-but-progressing body is unaffected; only a body that goes
quiet for the full timeout is aborted.
- **What "progress" means, precisely.** The idle timer resets on bytes
read from the *decoded* body — after `net/http`'s own transparent gzip
decompression, when the upstream used it. A gzip'd response whose
compressed bytes keep arriving on the wire but whose deflate stream
yields no decompressed output for the whole timeout window is still
aborted: this gateway has no visibility into wire-level progress
without a transport or connection wrapper, which is disproportionate at
the five-minute default. In the same vein, a streaming forwarder reads
one chunk from the upstream, writes it to the client, then reads again
— the write is not itself watched, so time spent blocked writing to a
slow or stalled client counts against the SAME idle window as a silent
upstream. Aborting in that case is still the right call (holding an
upstream connection open indefinitely for a stalled client is its own
problem), but the failure is not always the provider's fault even
though the request is attributed to one for accounting purposes.
- **Never retried.** A `ResponseHeaderTimeout` failure surfaces as a
`context.DeadlineExceeded`-shaped error, which [Retry](#retry)'s own
transient classification explicitly excludes. A mid-body watchdog
timeout happens after the retry mechanism has already returned its
response to the caller, so it is never in a position to be retried
either way. Not retrying a hang is the intended behavior — retrying a
provider that just proved it cannot make progress would only waste the
same amount of time again.
- **Scope and override**: `requestTimeout` (top level) sets the global
default. A provider's own `requestTimeout` overrides it — an explicit
override always wins. Native passthrough for a provider uses that same
@@ -887,9 +914,26 @@ request forever. Default, when neither `requestTimeout` field is set:
never accepted here as "no timeout": that would silently reintroduce the
exact hang this feature fixes.
- **Classification**: a timeout firing is always logged and reported to
the client as a provider failure (`502`, `server_error`), naming the
provider, and is never classified as a client disconnect
(`context.Canceled`) — the two stay distinguishable in every log line.
the client as an upstream failure (`502`, `server_error`), naming
whichever provider or target the request was addressed to, and is never
classified as a client disconnect (`context.Canceled`) — the two stay
distinguishable in every log line. The log wording says "upstream
progress stalled", not "provider timed out": for the reason described
above (a slow client can trip the same watchdog a slow provider does),
the message reports what was observed without asserting which side
caused it.
**Federated MCP (`POST /mcp`) is bounded differently, not left unbounded.**
`mcp_federation.go`'s two direct upstream calls
(`doBackendJSONRPC`/`mcpBackendCloseSession`) are not wrapped by the
idle-progress watchdog described above — a federated backend that sends
headers and then stalls mid-body is not caught by it. They are not
unbounded either: both still run through `g.targetClient`, so
`Transport.ResponseHeaderTimeout` (the global `requestTimeout`) still
bounds the wait for headers, and each call additionally runs under its
own fixed `context.WithTimeout` — 20s for `tools/list`, 120s for
`tools/call`, 5s for the best-effort session-close DELETE. A worst-case
stall there is bounded at whichever of those applies, not indefinite.
## Caching