AWS lambda function stops working after timed out error

You should look for how your function handle works with a specific context.callbackWaitsForEmptyEventLoop

If that boolean-type is false, the setTimeout won't be ever fired, because you might've answered/handled the lambda invocation earlier.But if the value of callbackWaitsForEmptyEventLoop is true - then your code will do what you are looking for.

Also - it's probably easier to handle everything via callbacks directly, without the need for "hand-written" timeouts, changing configuration timeouts and so on...

E.g.

function doneFactory(cb) { // closure factory returning a callback function which knows about res (response)  return function(err, res) {    if (err) {      return cb(JSON.stringify(err));    }    return cb(null, res);  };}// you're going to call this Lambda function from your codeexports.handle = function(event, context, handleCallback) {  // allows for using callbacks as finish/error-handlers  context.callbackWaitsForEmptyEventLoop = false;  doSomeAsyncWork(event, context, doneFactory(handleCallback));};

well if you defined 3 seconds in your function configuration, this timeout will override the time inside your code, so make sure to increase the timeout from your lambda function configs and try again the wait() and it should work!

I've run into the same issue, in fact there are many cases when Lambda becomes unresponsive, e.g.:

1. Parsing not valid json:

   exports.handler = function(event, context, callback){    var nonValidJson = "Not even Json";    var jsonParse = JSON.parse(nonValidJson);

2. Accessing property of undefined variable:

   exports.handler = function(event, context, callback){    var emptyObject = {};    var value = emptyObject.Item.Key;

3. Not closing mySql connection after accessing RDS leads to Lambda timeout and then it becomes non-responsive.

When I'm saying unresponsive it's literally not even loading, i.e. first print inside handler isn't printed, and Lambda just exits every run with timeout:

exports.handler = function(event, context, callback){    console.log("Hello there");

It's a bug, known by AWS team for almost a year:
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=238434&tstart=0

Unfortunately it's still not fixed, after some tests it's revealed that in fact Lambda tries to restart (reload the container?), there is just not enough time. If you set the timeout to be 10s, after ~4s of execution time Lambda starts working, and then in next runs comes to behave normally. I've also tried playing with setting:

context.callbackWaitsForEmptyEventLoop = false;

and putting all 'require' blocks inside handler, nothing really worked. The only way to prevent Lambda becoming dead is setting bigger timeout, 10s should be more than enough as a workaround protection against this bug.