# Self-Healing CI: Recovering a Slow Cold Start That Times Out a Step

> A step that times out waiting on a slow cold start hit a warmup delay, not a hang. See the manual fix and how self-healing CI waits and retries.

Source: https://latchkey.dev/learn/self-healing-ci/self-healing-cold-start-step-timeout  
Updated: 2026-06-26

A step that times out waiting for something to warm up was slow to start, not stuck -- once it is warm, the same step completes well within budget.

## What makes a failure safely retryable

Automatic retry is only correct for failures that are genuinely transient. Retrying a deterministic failure wastes minutes and hides a real defect, so the classification matters more than the retry mechanism.

- Safe to retry: network timeouts, registry 5xx, transient DNS failures, a service container that was not ready, a spot instance reclaimed mid-run.
- Not safe to retry: assertion failures, compile errors, lint violations, anything that fails identically on every attempt.
- Ambiguous, and worth investigating rather than retrying: out-of-memory kills, disk exhaustion, and flaky tests. These repeat under load and a retry only hides the trend.
- Always record that a retry happened. A pipeline that silently retries is a pipeline whose real failure rate you do not know.

## FAQ

### What causes Self-Healing CI: recovering a slow cold start that times out a step?

A step times out waiting for a service, function, or container to become responsive on its first invocation -- a cold start. The thing being waited on is healthy; it just needed longer to initialize on the first hit. A human re-runs the job (now warm) or extends the wait and it passes unchanged.

### How do I fix Self-Healing CI: recovering a slow cold start that times out a step manually?

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### Can Self-Healing CI: recovering a slow cold start that times out a step be fixed automatically?

A cold-start timeout is distinguishable from a genuine hang by whether a retry (now warm) completes promptly. A self-healing CI pipeline detects the warmup-driven timeout, waits for readiness and retries, and only escalates if the dependency stays unresponsive, which is the real signal of a broken service rather than a slow first start.

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Latchkey runs CI/CD that repairs its own failures. Agent entry points: https://latchkey.dev/agent.txt, https://latchkey.dev/openapi.json, https://latchkey.dev/llms.txt