What Is a Socket Read Timeout?
A socket read timeout is a limit on how long a read operation on a socket will block waiting for incoming data before it returns an error. Without it, a peer that stops sending can leave the reader waiting forever. With it, the program fails fast and can retry or report the stall instead of hanging.
Why it matters
A missing read timeout is a frequent cause of CI jobs that hang until the overall pipeline timeout rather than failing quickly. Setting a sensible timeout turns an indefinite hang into a clean, retryable error.
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