The timeout period refers to the length of time a transaction waits to acquire a lock before it gives up. A deadlock occurs when two or more transactions are waiting for each other in a cyclic fashion.
When a transaction is waiting for a resource that is locked by another transaction, it waits until one of the following occurs:
It is the responsibility of the program to roll back changes already applied, thereby releasing all locks. When a lock is not granted, a lock error message is returned to the program.
If the timeout period concludes before a lock is acquired, the transaction may perform other processing before attempting again to acquire a lock. Alternatively, it may roll back the entire transaction and retry it later. It is the responsibility of a program to retry a transaction that has been rolled back.
The timeout period is measured in seconds and can be set in the client configuration.