Make the database timeout configurable

Development Approved RFCs
#1

Summary: make database timeout configurable

I allow this RFC document to be modified and redistributed under the terms of the Apache-2.0 license, or the CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 license, at your option.

Motivation

Depending on the way bors is deployed, the default timeout might be too short.

Guide-level explanation

If your deployment requires it, you can change the database timeout, such as in your docker-compose.yml

DATABASE_TIMEOUT: 60000

Reference-level explanation

The new environment variable:

  • DATABASE_TIMEOUT may be set higher than the default of 15_000(ms). This may be necessary with repositories with a very large amount of members.

We recommend also trying to make sure you have a high POOL_SIZE if you’re going to do this, so that other queries don’t get blocked, and also using a slow query log to try to find and optimize whichever query or transaction is taking so long.

Drawbacks

It might just be masking a problem, such as a missing index or a transaction that’s blocking on an API call.

Rationale and alternatives

It’s pretty much just exposing Ecto’s timeout setting. I’m not sure how else it would work.

We could also try to avoid hitting the lower timeout by modifying the code, or by dedicating a better database server to it, but that requires lots of work and profiling.

Prior art

Basically everybody exposes this kind of configurable knob. It’s weird that bors-ng didn’t.

Unresolved questions

Beyond bikeshedding the name? Nothing really.

Future possibilities

We expose API and database timeouts. How about incoming HTTP timeouts?

See also

#2

This seems pretty uncontroversial.

It's now entering final comment period. Disposition: accept.

#3

Thanks for the RFC and I'm happy that this change makes it in :slight_smile:

#4

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https://bors.tech/rfcs/0547-make-the-database-timeout-configurable.html