Requests hang forever: why missing timeouts cause recurring outages in .NET

This post was originally published on MatrixTrak.com — the production reliability toolkit for trading bot operators and .NET engineers. When requests hang forever and recycling releases stuck work: why missing timeouts create backlog, how to add budgets safely, and the rollout plan that prevents new incidents.. Most production incidents do not start as "down." They start as waiting. At 09:12 a dependency slows down. Your ASP.NET instances look healthy. CPU is fine. Memory is fine. But requests stop finishing. In-flight count climbs. Connection pools stop turning over. You scale out and it does not help because the new instances just join the waiting. The cost is not subtle. Backlog grows, SLAs fail, and on-call starts recycling processes because it is the only thing that releases the stuck work. Then the incident repeats next week because nothing changed about the waiting. This post gives you a production playbook for .NET: how to set time budgets, wire cancellation, and roll it out without triggering a new outage. Rescuing an ASP.NET service in production? Start at the .NET Production Rescue hub . If you only do three things Write down a total budget per request/job (then enforce it). Set per-attempt timeouts for each dependency and log elapsedMs , timeoutMs , and the decision (retry/stop/fallback). Propagate cancellation end-to-end so work stops (no zombie work after timeouts). Why requests hang forever: infinite waits capture capacity Missing timeouts are not a performance problem. They are a capacity problem. When a call can wait forever, it will eventually wait longer than your system can afford. While it waits, it holds something your service needs to operate: a worker slot, a thread, a connection, a lock, or a request budget. Once enough requests or jobs are holding those resources, the system stops behaving like a service and starts behaving like a queue you did not design. From the outside it looks like "everything is slow." Underneath, you are accumulating