Metaculus / Metaculus/forecasting-tools

Bots timeout occasionally, and seem to take much longer than they should

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#214 0 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@elisescu is already working on this.

Since Feb 18, 2026.

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Description

Some bots occasionally take a really long time to run. I'm not sure why.
Examplest errors

  • link
  • link
  • Figure out why deepseek v3_2 has timeout. Does it really take > 3min to forecast? link

Most of this has been solved with longer timeouts per response. But a bot shouldn't need 5min to make a forecast I don't think. This makes me think I'm doing something wrong.

Hypotheses

  • It actually takes bots this long
  • The Metaculus Client has a sync timeout when waiting between requests in order to avoid rate limiting. If this triggers when one forecast finishes, then the other forecasts wait a while to finish (though the long timeouts happened even before the rate limiting change).
  • Something to do with the concurrency limit 1 for research
  • We are using 2 structure_outputs per forecast
  • We messed up batching somewhere

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