How to configure custom tool timeout in ADK agent?

[DevVaibhav07]

I am building an agent with ADK and have a custom tool that makes HTTP requests to an external API. Sometimes the API is slow and the tool times out.

Is there a way to configure the timeout for individual tools in ADK? I looked at the Tool class but could not find a timeout parameter.

Example of what I am trying to do:

from google.adk import Agent, Tool

def my_slow_tool(query: str) -> str:
    # This sometimes takes >30s
    response = requests.get(f"https://api.example.com/search?q={query}", timeout=60)
    return response.text

agent = Agent(
    model="gemini-2.0-flash",
    tools=[my_slow_tool],
    # How to set tool-level timeout?
)

Any guidance would be appreciated. Thank you!

[agrovr]

There is currently no per-tool timeout property on ADK's FunctionTool. Put the deadline in the tool implementation (and separately check whether your web server/job runner has a shorter outer timeout).

For an HTTP tool, an async implementation gives you both transport-level timeouts and a hard wall-clock deadline:

import asyncio
import httpx

async def my_slow_tool(query: str) -> dict:
    try:
        # Overall deadline for the complete tool call.
        async with asyncio.timeout(60):
            timeout = httpx.Timeout(55.0, connect=5.0)
            async with httpx.AsyncClient(timeout=timeout) as client:
                response = await client.get(
                    "https://api.example.com/search",
                    params={"q": query},
                )
                response.raise_for_status()
                return {"ok": True, "result": response.text}
    except TimeoutError:
        return {"ok": False, "error": "Search exceeded the 60-second deadline."}
    except httpx.TimeoutException as exc:
        return {"ok": False, "error": f"Search API timed out: {exc}"}
    except httpx.HTTPError as exc:
        return {"ok": False, "error": f"Search API failed: {exc}"}

Pass my_slow_tool in tools=[my_slow_tool]; ADK wraps the callable. The current FunctionTool constructor accepts the callable and confirmation behavior, but no timeout, and run_async() awaits the callable directly: https://github.com/google/adk-python/blob/main/src/google/adk/tools/function_tool.py

If you keep requests, its timeout should usually be a (connect, read) tuple and you should catch requests.Timeout, but that is a socket-operation timeout—not necessarily a hard deadline for all work in the function. Also, cancelling a wrapper around blocking synchronous I/O does not reliably stop the underlying thread, which is why async HTTP is preferable here.

If the operation is expected to take longer than the request/runtime limit, return a job ID and poll it (or use ADK's long-running tool pattern) rather than holding one tool call open.