---
title: "Define a time limit"
description: "Learn how to set a conversion time limit at PDFShift. This will allow you to define a maximum time for the conversion process to complete, and if the process takes longer than the defined time, the conversion will be aborted. This guides explains you how to achieve it using Ruby and the Faraday library."
language: 'Ruby'
library: 'Faraday'
property: 'timeout'
output: 'pdf'
related: ['waiting-for-a-custom-element-to-be-ready']
default: false
---

In this guide, we'll show you how you can set a conversion time limit at PDFShift. This will allow you to define a maximum time for the conversion process to complete, and if the process takes longer than the defined time, the conversion will be aborted.

In some cases, this can be useful if you want the request to not be too long and then handle failure on your end depending on the result.

To do so, we use the `timeout` property, which is the maximum time in **seconds** that the request is allowed to take. If the request takes longer than the defined time, the conversion will be aborted.

```ruby
require 'faraday'
require 'json'

# You can get an API key at https://pdfshift.io
api_key = 'sk_xxxxxxxxxxxx'

params = {
    'source' => 'https://www.example.com',
    'timeout' => 10
}

# Create a Faraday connection
conn = Faraday.new(url: "https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf") do |faraday|
    faraday.request :url_encoded
    faraday.adapter Faraday.default_adapter
end

# Make the POST request
response = conn.post do |req|
    req.headers['Content-Type'] = 'application/json'
    req.headers['X-API-Key'] = api_key
    req.body = params.to_json
end

# Check for successful response
unless response.success?
    raise "Request failed with status code #{response.status}: #{response.body}"
end

# write response to a file nammed "result.pdf"
File.open('result.pdf', 'wb') { |f| f.write(response.body) }

# Print a success message
puts 'The PDF document was generated and saved to result.pdf'
```

In the above example, the conversion could fail if the conversion takes longer than 10 seconds.