&quot;When used as a failure detector, timeouts are just a guess that something is wrong.&quot;<p>I send a packet over the network.  I configured the timeout to be 10 seconds.  10 seconds passes.  Is the packet truly lost?  Or, maybe the packet was received, processed, and and a response is on the way back, but it takes 20 seconds instead of 10!  Or maybe it takes an hour instead of 20 seconds.  Or a decade.<p>We don&#x27;t know if the packet is truly lost or is just taking &gt;$timeout_timer and making assumptions is dangerous.