What is the purpose of including timeouts in external component calls?

Including timeouts in external component calls serves multiple purposes, with one key aspect being to provide a fallback recovery action. When a system or application makes a request to an external component—such as a web service, database, or another system—there is always a risk that the external component may become unresponsive or take too long to respond. By setting a timeout period, the system can define the maximum amount of time it will wait for a response. If the response is not received within this time frame, this triggers a fallback mechanism that can help the system continue functioning smoothly, rather than hanging indefinitely.

This approach is essential for maintaining system reliability and user experience. The fallback recovery action might involve returning an error message to the user, retrying the action, switching to a backup service, or defaulting to cached data. Thus, the primary benefit of implementing timeouts is to ensure that the system can gracefully handle situations where external components fail to respond within an expected time frame.

The other options relate to functions that timeouts may indirectly assist with but do not capture the core necessity of providing a reliable way to handle delays or unresponsive external calls, which is critical for robust system design.