When you call another service over HTTP, you are inheriting its worst day. If that dependency slows to a crawl, every request you make to it piles up, holds a connection, and eventually drags your service down with it. The fix is two old, unglamorous patterns: aggressive timeouts and a circuit breaker. Here is how to implement both in Node.js with no framework.
Step 1: Never make a request without a timeout
The single most common production incident is a missing timeout. By default, most HTTP clients will wait forever. One stalled dependency is enough to exhaust your connection pool.
async function fetchWithTimeout(url, { timeoutMs = 2000, ...options } = {}) {
const controller = new AbortController();
