Per-category timeouts

By default every external classifier (AWS Bedrock, Azure Content Safety, custom webhooks) shares a flat 1500ms timeout. That’s pessimistic for fast checks like PII (typically <150ms) and bites p99 when a slow check ties up the budget.

Per-category timeouts let you set per-class budgets so fast checks fail fast and slow checks get the time they need.

Default behavior

Opt-in. Without configuration, the flat global timeout (DEEPINTSHIELD_GUARD_ADAPTER_TIMEOUT_MS, default 1500ms) applies to every adapter call.

Configure it

Map check categories to millisecond budgets. Categories are matched case-insensitively against the policy’s metadata category field (falls back to check_class).

# Via plugin config:
{
  "embedded_timeouts_by_category": {
    "pii": 150,
    "toxicity": 600,
    "jailbreak": 1200,
    "hallucination": 800,
    "prompt_injection": 400
  }
}

# Or via env (JSON-encoded):
DEEPINTSHIELD_GUARD_TIMEOUTS_BY_CATEGORY='{"pii":150,"toxicity":600,"jailbreak":1200}'

Precedence

For each individual adapter call, the budget is picked in this order:

1. policy.TimeoutMs — an explicit override set on the policy itself.
2. Per-category timeout — matched from the map above.
3. Global adapter timeout — the flat 1500ms (or your override).

Fail-open semantics

If an adapter call times out:

• The error becomes a chain-trace entry (visible in the audit log).
• No finding is emitted for the timed-out check.
• Other checks running in parallel still complete normally.
• The request continues with the verdicts from checks that succeeded.

Fail-open vs fail-closed

The default is fail-open — a timed-out check produces no finding and the request proceeds. For regulated environments where missing a check is worse than slow responses, set fail_open: false in the plugin config. Doing so turns adapter timeouts into 503 guardrail_runtime_unavailable errors.

Realistic budgets

Category	Typical p95	Recommended budget
PII patterns	<50ms	150ms
Prompt injection	100–300ms	400ms
Toxicity	200–500ms	600ms
Hallucination	300–700ms	800ms
Jailbreak (LLM)	500–1000ms	1200ms

Pulling p99 down by ~30–50% is realistic once you replace the flat 1500ms ceiling with these.