Custom Timeouts

Overview

Every client operation has an implicit deadline — how long to wait for a response, how long before a dead socket is detected, how long reconnection retries wait between attempts. The defaults are reasonable for a healthy local network, but they're wrong for high-latency links, connections that pass through load balancers or NAT gateways, or servers that occasionally run slow under load. Tuning timeouts explicitly is how you trade fast-fail behavior against tolerance for transient slowness.

Each setting targets a different phase of the client lifecycle. default_timeout sets the gRPC deadline in seconds for unary operations like ping; KeepAliveConfig's ping_interval_seconds / ping_timeout_seconds configure periodic pings that detect a dead connection and keep firewalls from silently closing idle ones; and ReconnectPolicy's base_interval (with multiplier and max_delay) governs the exponential backoff between automatic reconnection attempts. Gotchas: a default_timeout shorter than the server's real processing time causes spurious failures, not faster detection of a genuinely broken operation; an aggressive ping_interval_seconds can flag a slow-but-healthy link as dead; and ReconnectPolicy has no attempt cap by default, so it will keep retrying against a server that's down for good unless you bound it yourself.

Prerequisites

• KubeMQ server running on localhost:50000
• Ruby SDK installed (gem install kubemq)

Code

require 'kubemq'

address = ENV.fetch('KUBEMQ_ADDRESS', 'localhost:50000')

begin
  client = KubeMQ::PubSubClient.new(
    address: address,
    client_id: 'timeout-example',
    default_timeout: 30,
    keepalive: KubeMQ::KeepAliveConfig.new(
      ping_interval_seconds: 10,
      ping_timeout_seconds: 5
    ),
    reconnect_policy: KubeMQ::ReconnectPolicy.new(
      base_interval: 3.0
    )
  )

  info = client.ping
  puts "Connected with custom timeouts. Server: #{info.version}"
rescue KubeMQ::Error => e
  puts "KubeMQ error: #{e.message}"
ensure
  client&.close
  puts 'Done'
end

How It Works

• default_timeout sets the gRPC deadline in seconds for unary operations.
• KeepAliveConfig controls periodic pings that detect dead connections and keep firewalls from closing idle connections.
• ReconnectPolicy controls the delay between automatic reconnection attempts (exponential backoff via base_interval, multiplier, and max_delay).
• Review timeouts, channel names, and client IDs before running against shared environments.

Related

• Ruby SDK Reference
• Connect
• Reconnection