fraud agent timed out on signifyd case lookup with 40s latency

TL;DR

A 40-second lookup should never block the agent. Fire the lookup asynchronously, poll with a short timeout, serve repeat lookups from a local case cache, and escalate cases that stay stale past your SLA.

fraud agent timed out on signifyd case lookup with 40s latency

Use this when

• Case fetches take tens of seconds and stall the run.
• The queue backs up behind one slow case.
• The same case gets looked up more than once per run.

Not for this skill when

• Guarantee decisions are wrong. That is decision logic.
• The API returns errors. That is a failure, not latency.
• Lookups are fast but the agent is slow. That is an agent problem.

Steps

1. Make the case lookup async: fire the request and poll for completion instead of blocking. Verify: the agent keeps working while the lookup runs.
2. Set a short per-poll timeout with bounded retries. Verify: one slow poll does not stall the loop.
3. Cache case results locally with a TTL for the run. Verify: the same case is never fetched twice.
4. Define a staleness SLA: cases unfetched after N minutes escalate to manual review. Verify: no case waits forever in the queue.
5. Track lookup latency per endpoint. Verify: you can show whether 40s is normal or a regression.

Variant phrasings

signifyd case lookup slow agent

Same problem, common phrasing.

signifyd 40 second latency

Symptom-level search.

case fetch timeout signifyd agent

Operational wording.

Compatibility: Signifyd Cases API consumed by an agent review loop.

Why it happens

Case lookups join data across Signifyd's investigation history, so they are slower than score calls, and agents that block on them serialize the whole queue behind one slow case. Async polling plus caching turns the slowest call in the loop into background work the agent does not wait on. Slow lookups also poison agent planning: the agent cannot decide the next step until the case arrives, so async polling lets it do other work, like pulling related transactions, while the case loads.

Edge cases / pitfalls

• Cached cases go stale. Keep the TTL short and refresh cases near decision time.
• Polling too aggressively becomes its own rate limit problem. Use sensible intervals.
• A case that never returns is a signal. Escalate it rather than dropping it.
• Do not let async lookups pile up unbounded. Cap in-flight polls.
• If one case type is always slow, prefetch it at queue intake instead of at decision time.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_YWmYWsx2i8vR8GmveeuBOQ