what's the lowest the timeout value in apache should be set to?

I'm having is开发者_C百科sues with rails/ruby passenger and need to lower the timeout value for apache.

I lowered it to 30 before. What are the effects of setting it really low - like 5 seconds?

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From apache doc:

Amount of time the server will wait for certain events before failing a request

I'm currently investigating where this timout is the one applied in to how long it will wait until it receives an answer from a network operation that is not answering. Lowering the timeout will make it stop waiting for an answer if none is returned. Having it to short will probably cause that in some cases operations does not have time to finish in time.

The solution for me is to find the root cause of why the network operation takes so long time. And not to lowering the timeout value to force it to exit without having the answer it was looking for.