How to set a timeout on a Spring Boot REST API?

Question

I have some REST APIs that may take a while to execute, and I want to limit their execution duration. Preferably, if 30 seconds passed and the request didn't return, I would like to return a specific HTTP code / data and terminate that request completly.

The current code:

@RestController
@CrossOrigin(origins = {"*"}, maxAge = 4800, allowCredentials = "false")
public class APIController {

@RequestMapping(value = "/api/myapifunc", method = RequestMethod.POST, produces = "application/json")
public ResponseEntity<?> optimize(@RequestParam(value="param1", defaultValue="")) {
    // Code here
}

Answer 1

It looks like you are describing the Circuit Breaker pattern. If you have control over both the client and server code and want to explore Spring Cloud and Netflix Hysterix libraries you can take a look at Getting Started: Circuit Breaker guide.

If you are using Apache Tomcat as your servlet container you can configure Stuck Thread Detection Valve:

This valve allows to detect requests that take a long time to process, which might indicate that the thread that is processing it is stuck. Additionally it can optionally interrupt such threads to try and unblock them.

When such a request is detected, the current stack trace of its thread is written to Tomcat log with a WARN level.

The IDs and names of the stuck threads are available through JMX in the stuckThreadIds and stuckThreadNames attributes. The IDs can be used with the standard Threading JVM MBean (java.lang:type=Threading) to retrieve other information about each stuck thread.