How I Fixed My AI Chatbot's Timeout Nightmare (opens in new tab)

I spent three weeks debugging an AI chatbot that kept timing out. It wasn't the API itself—it was how I was calling it. Here's what I learned. The Problem Last quarter, I was building a customer support chatbot for a SaaS product. The idea was simple: users ask questions, an AI model returns natural language answers. We picked an AI API that seemed solid—decent latency, good accuracy. But in production, everything fell apart. Users would type a question, wait... and wait... then get a 504 Gat...