---
title: "MGS1032: timeout declaration no longer describes the target"
description: Fires when a target's declared timeout has been crowded by the durations magus recorded for it, or sits so far above them that it would not end a hang inside any useful window.
tags: [MGS1032, timeout, doctor, declarations, runaway, hang]
---

# MGS1032: timeout declaration no longer describes the target

`magus doctor` compared each declared `timeout` against how long magus recorded the
target actually running, and they no longer bracket each other.

```text
advice  timeout declarations
        2 of 5 declared timeout(s) no longer describe the target; a ceiling is only
        a guard while it brackets real runs
        - (workspace root) security declares a 15m timeout and has already run for
          13m0s; the next slow machine fails a build that was fine
        - docs render declares a 12h timeout and has never run longer than 42s; a
          hang would hold its locks that long before anything noticed
```

## Why

A ceiling is a claim about a target, and claims rot. This is the sibling of
[MGS1030](MGS1030.md), which keeps `memory_mb` honest for the same reason and by the
same means: magus already records the figure, so the disagreement is a fact it holds
rather than a question the author has to think to ask.

Both directions cost something, and they cost different things:

- **Crowded**: a recorded run has reached three quarters of the ceiling. Nothing is
  broken yet, and that is the point of reporting it now - the next cold cache or
  slower machine turns a correct build into a failed one, and a guard that starts
  failing legitimate runs teaches its author to raise it without reading, which is
  how a ceiling stops meaning anything.
- **Loose**: the ceiling is more than a hundred times the longest run on record. The
  number is not wrong, it has stopped doing its job: a hung target would hold its
  project locks for most of a day before anything fired.

A hundred times is deliberately far out. A correctly written guard sits well above
its measurements - magus's own two declarations run at roughly seven and twenty times
their worst recorded run - and a threshold that reported those would be a check
nobody reads.

## What is not reported

**An undeclared target draws silence.** Unlike `memory_mb`, where declaring nothing
is measurably harmful because machine-wide admission goes blind, an undeclared
timeout is the documented default and costs nothing until a target hangs. And a
target that hangs records no duration, so the evidence for the finding does not
exist: magus would be arguing from the runs that went fine.

**A target that has never run** draws silence for the same reason. There is a
declaration but no measurement, and inventing a comparison would be worse than saying
nothing.

**Runs shorter than two seconds** are not compared. The noise in one measurement - a
cold toolchain, a busy machine - is a large fraction of the figure, so a ratio against
it describes the machine rather than the declaration.

## Resolution

1. **Move the ceiling.** For a crowded one, raise it against the worst run on record
   rather than the typical one. For a loose one, lower it to something a person would
   actually wait through:

   ```buzz
   magus\project({
       "targets": {
           "security": {"timeout": "30m"},
       },
   });
   ```

2. **Fix the target**, if the growth is the surprise rather than the declaration. A
   crowded ceiling on a target nobody made slower usually means it started waiting on
   something.

3. **Leave it alone deliberately.** How much headroom a runaway guard carries is a
   judgment about the worst machine it will ever run on, which magus has not seen.
   This is advice, never a failure, and nothing will escalate.

## See also

- [MGS3011](../sandbox/MGS3011.md): what happens when a target actually exceeds its
  ceiling.
- [MGS1030](MGS1030.md): the same check for `memory_mb`.