set_time_limit not working

[eroltoker]

I'm trying to avoid the default bref-php timeout behavior because it returns a 500 error without any descriptive body, which makes my customers keep trying the API.

I would like to do something like this :

set_time_limit(3);
register_shutdown_function(function() {
});

However, set_time_limit doesn't appear to be doing anything. Would really appreciate advice on how to achieve this without having to do constant 'how long has it been since this script was invoked' checks throughout my code.

[mnapoli]

Please detail what runtime you are using this with.

[eroltoker]

Hi @mnapoli , runtime: php-83-fpm

[mnapoli]

I think this might be it:

from https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.set-time-limit.php

[eroltoker]

I didn't find anything saying this shouldn't be compatible with php-fpm. In my test I'm setting the time limit to 3s and it's doing nothing.

I am also open to suggestions of a better way to handle this sort of timeout, whether natively through bref or another way. At the moment, the only option I have to control this is putting a proxy like nginx in front of the bref/lambda service. Do you have any suggestions, or does this need to be a feature improvement?

[mnapoli]

This is a limitation from PHP, not Bref.

The most common scenario is your code is reaching out to a 3rd party system, e.g. an HTTP API. Set timeouts on your HTTP requests/client. The default of most libraries is "no timeout", which is a terrible default. I think our PHP ecosystem is at fault here unfortunately, we've taken a bad habit and just made it default everywhere. There's always a time limit in the end, we almost never want some external call to take hours 😛

[eroltoker]

Right, I understand your point. I'm just wondering, from what I can tell in the logs bref is actually the part of the stack that kills the request early if it hits 26s (it seems to do this to avoid having lambda itself terminate the process). If that's the case, I'm wondering if this is a potential improvement worth submitting a ticket for -- allow the user to register a shutdown function of some sort that gets called to wrap up the request instead of bref's cutoff behavior. If not, I will just move on and do this the dirty way putting a timer in my code, or the right way adding an nginx proxy inbetween .

[mnapoli]

Unfortunately there's no solution I can see here. PHP doesn't have a way to set a real timeout limit that works with a shutdown function. set_time_limit is unreliable, and so Bref terminates it "hard" (like FPM does sometimes on servers).