I spent three weeks debugging an AI chatbot that kept timing out. It wasn't the API itself—it was how I was calling it. Here's what I learned.
The Problem
Last quarter, I was building a customer support chatbot for a SaaS product. The idea was simple: users ask questions, an AI model returns natural language answers. We picked an AI API that seemed solid—decent latency, good accuracy. But in production, everything fell apart.
Users would type a question, wait... and wait... then get a 504 Gateway Timeout. Our logs showed that about 15% of requests were failing because the API response took longer than our 30-second timeout. Even when it worked, the answer arrived in one big chunk after 10-20 seconds. Users started leaving the chat mid-response.
This wasn't a theoretical problem. It was happening to real people, and my boss was not happy.
