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Drain Timeout - CI/CD Glossary Definition

A drain timeout is the grace period before a graceful shutdown is force-killed.

A drain timeout is the grace period a system waits for a process to shut down gracefully after SIGTERM before escalating to SIGKILL and forcibly terminating it.

A drain timeout bounds how long a graceful shutdown may take. If the process has not exited when the timeout expires, the system sends SIGKILL.

In CI

A too-short drain timeout can cut off in-flight uploads and corrupt caches; a too-long one delays autoscaling. Match it to your longest clean-shutdown path.

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