Elixir task timeout pitfall

[minhajuddin]

@benwilson512

No, you’re setting the same timeout for each task. However, each call to Task.await is consecutive. Thus, the first task is given 5 seconds to timeout. Then the next task is given 5 seconds to timeout, and so forth. Every task is given 5 seconds. This is absolutely expected because the Task.await call is happening inside a loop. It will happen for each item independently, because that’s how loops work.

The effecive timeout for the first task is 5 seconds and the second task is 10 seconds and so on, the last task would have had 50 seconds before being timed out, because when we the current process is executing the first Task.await the other processes are still running and happily doing their computation.