GCP Cloud Functions timing out with Flask app despite increased timeout settings
I'm updating my dependencies and I've been banging my head against this for hours..... I'm working with a frustrating scenario with my GCP Cloud Function that runs a Flask application. Despite increasing the timeout setting to the maximum of 9 minutes, I'm still getting a timeout behavior after approximately 60 seconds when trying to handle larger payloads. The function processes incoming HTTP requests and sometimes needs to make external API calls that can be slow. Here’s the relevant part of my function: ```python import json import requests from flask import Flask, request app = Flask(__name__) @app.route('/process', methods=['POST']) def process_data(): data = request.get_json() response = requests.post('https://external.api/endpoint', json=data) return json.dumps(response.json()), response.status_code if __name__ == '__main__': app.run() # Note: Not used in GCP, but for local dev ``` I’ve tried adjusting the timeout settings in the GCP console under Cloud Functions configuration and also in the deployment command like this: ```shell gcloud functions deploy process_data --timeout 540 ``` However, the requests to the external API can sometimes take longer due to network latency. My request payload can also be quite large, often exceeding 2MB. I thought using Cloud Functions would automatically handle scaling and long-running processes, but it seems like there’s a hard limit kicking in. I also checked the logs in Stackdriver, and they show the function timing out but no additional details. Is there a known limitation for Cloud Functions that I'm missing, or is there a different approach I should consider for handling long-running tasks? Would using Cloud Run or Cloud Tasks be a more suitable solution for this scenario? Any insights would be greatly appreciated! Is there a better approach? Any feedback is welcome!