Timeouts

Set request and backend timeouts to prevent long-running requests.

Attaches to: Route

Route

Backend

Note

Agentgateway supports more than one configuration style. Where a feature can also be configured in the simplified llm or mcp modes, the examples on this page show each option in tabs. For more information, see Routing-based configuration.

Request timeouts Timeouts can be configured at the request or backend level. allow returning an error for requests that take too long to complete.

Route Timeouts

You can configure two types of timeouts on a route.

Timeout	Description
requestTimeout	The time from the start of an incoming request, until the end of the response headers is received. Note if there are retries, this includes the total time across retries.
backendRequestTimeout	The time from the start of a request to a backend, until the end of the response headers are completed. Note this is per-request, so with retries this is a per-retry timeout.

Simplified (MCP)Routing-based

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://agentgateway.dev/schema/config
mcp:
  port: 3000
  policies:
    timeout:
      requestTimeout: 1s
  targets:
    - name: everything
      stdio:
        cmd: npx
        args: ['@modelcontextprotocol/server-everything']
yaml
# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://agentgateway.dev/schema/config
gateways:
  default:
    port: 3000
routes:
  - policies:
      timeout:
        requestTimeout: 1s
    backends:
      - host: localhost:8080

Backend Timeouts

In addition to route level timeouts, you can configure per-backend timeouts within the backend configuration section.

Timeout	Description
requestTimeout	The time from the start of an HTTP request to a backend until the response headers are completed.
connectTimeout	The time from the start of a TCP connection to a backend until the connection is established.

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://agentgateway.dev/schema/config
gateways:
  default:
    port: 3000
routes:
  - backends:
      - host: localhost:8080
        policies:
          http:
            requestTimeout: 1s
          tcp:
            connectTimeout: 10s
            # Required when setting tcp connection options; {} keeps keepalive defaults
            keepalives: {}