Fix: Jenkins Pipeline Timeout

!Symptoms

• Jenkins build shows 'Cancelling nested steps due to timeout'
• Pipeline stuck for hours with no progress
• Build marked as ABORTED after timeout period
• Agent goes offline during long builds

?Root Causes

• Test suite hanging on a specific test (deadlock, infinite loop)
• Waiting for user input in a non-interactive pipeline
• Agent ran out of disk space during build
• Network issue causing downloads to hang
• Docker build stuck on a layer (e.g., large dependency install)

#Diagnosis Steps

1. 1Check the Jenkins console output to see which step was running when timeout occurred
2. 2Look at the agent system resources (disk, memory, CPU) during the build
3. 3Check for `input` steps that might be waiting for approval
4. 4Review the test logs for the last test that ran before the hang
5. 5Check network connectivity from the agent to external resources

>Fix

1. 1Add explicit timeouts to pipeline stages: `timeout(time: 30, unit: 'MINUTES') { ... }`
2. 2Kill the stuck process on the agent and retry
3. 3Free disk space on the agent: clean workspace, docker prune
4. 4Fix the hanging test (deadlock, missing mock, blocking I/O)
5. 5Use `options { timeout(time: 1, unit: 'HOURS') }` at the pipeline level

*Prevention

• Set stage-level timeouts for each critical step
• Set a global pipeline timeout as a safety net
• Monitor agent health (disk, memory) and alert on low resources
• Run tests with a timeout per test case (e.g., JUnit timeout annotation)
• Clean workspace before each build: `cleanWs()` post step

Related Error Messages