Tighten YouTube extraction timeouts and preserve failure diagnostics

[devhims]

Problem / Motivation

Transcript retrieval can spend too long waiting on stalled requests. Existing diagnostics also hide whether a failure occurred during connection setup, TLS, response headers, or body transfer. Live testing exposed an additional library deadline that canceled individual requests after ten seconds, even though the surrounding proxy attempt allowed twenty-five seconds.

What changed

Direct attempts now allow five seconds and proxy attempts twenty seconds. Proxy connection setup allows five seconds, TLS eight, response headers twelve, and body inactivity eight. The library request deadline is explicitly aligned to twenty seconds, so a valid caption response taking twelve seconds can still succeed.

Direct-first routing, proxy retry count, and the existing extraction architecture are retained. Diagnostics capture allowlisted timeout codes before error wrapping, identify request and operation deadlines, and preserve all five attempts through the cache coordinator. Generated types, API documentation, and operational guidance are updated.

Tests

Platform type checking, documentation checks, and 818 unit tests passed, with seven existing skips. All eight final deployed transcript checks passed. One direct request hit the five-second deadline and recovered through the proxy. Earlier live French translation checks returned HTTP 429 before any timeout; live translation remains unverified in this pass. Detailed observations are in the verification document.

Deployment

No production deployment was performed. The temporary Worker was deleted. Merging and deploying applies the settings without another toggle. Monitor latency and failure rate after rollout.

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated
video2ctx-web	Ready	Preview	Sep 27, 2026 8:21am UTC