API calls which are dependent on an external service include purchase, authorize, capture, credit (refund), and void. We have seen gateways take up to 60 seconds to respond to requests when under heavy load. Therefore, when Spreedly talks to a gateway, we use an internal timeout of 61 seconds. At that point, we stop waiting for the gateway to respond and mark the transaction as failed.
This means that for your code, you’ll want to use a timeout at least a second or two more than that (perhaps 64 seconds) for the API calls which interact with a gateway. If you set your timeout for less than that, it could lead to cases where your customer has successfully paid you but your application thinks the payment has failed.
For the API calls that don’t interact with a gateway like showing a transaction or retaining a payment method, a much shorter timeout is necessary. We recommend a timeout of 5-10 seconds to determine if there’s an issue talking to the Spreedly service.