Yes, Ruby’s HTTP client supports timeout. As I mentioned, we weren’t using Ruby’s HTTP client, we were using Airbnb’s HTTP client with some additional capabilities. But it also supports timeout. The issue here was that I don’t think it would help to time out with cancellation and then try again (if that’s what you’re suggesting). Genesys API calls weren’t failing, they were just returning very slowly. A retry wasn’t necessarily likely to return any faster since the slow responses tended to happen in bursts, presumably based on something weird happening on their side. Meanwhile, phone calls continued coming in to Airbnb’s support center (this gem handles incoming calls) and we needed to continue routing those to Genesys as well.

You mentioned “The only useful case where I believe Async Ruby can help is the parallel requests cases.” That’s what was happening here: because of the tail latency, we sometimes needed to have a lot more parallel requests.

Does that clear it up?