Timeout not not exiting aggressively enough

[litch]

I'm running a Rails 4.1 application that's fairly simple, connecting to Postgres. In both development and production environments I'm having problems with requests timing out. When I'm serving with Unicorn, the unicorn timeout can kill a process appropriaetly (though I don't get the exception sent out to logs or NewRelic or anything). I installed rack-timout, and it's "working" but it's unable to kill the requests.

user@1dde41d2aee9:/rails# rake middleware
use Rack::Timeout
use Librato::Rack
use Rack::Sendfile
use #<ActiveSupport::Cache::Strategy::LocalCache::Middleware:0x007f34cd513ac0>
use Rack::Runtime
...

#config/initializers/rack_timeout.rb
Rack::Timeout.timeout = 1

#merged unicorn_rails & application logs - stdout
source=rack-timeout id=075e816b5792ba35125ac51f55b3b61f timeout=1000ms state=ready at=info
I, [2014-05-03T16:53:11.425984 #1063]  INFO -- : Started GET "/markets/3" for 70.114.154.225 at 2014-05-03 16:53:11 +0000
I, [2014-05-03T16:53:11.427974 #1063]  INFO -- : Processing by MarketsController#show as HTML
I, [2014-05-03T16:53:11.428099 #1063]  INFO -- :   Parameters: {"id"=>"3"}
source=rack-timeout id=075e816b5792ba35125ac51f55b3b61f timeout=1000ms duration=1000ms state=timed_out at=error
E, [2014-05-03T16:54:12.188483 #1060] ERROR -- : worker=0 PID:1063 timeout (61s > 60s), killing
E, [2014-05-03T16:54:12.216382 #1060] ERROR -- : reaped #<Process::Status: pid 1063 SIGKILL (signal 9)> worker=0

I suspect it's a postgres IO issue that I'm hunting (rails/rails#12867), but just opening this because it seems like rack-timeout should be able to kill this.

[litch]

It seems like I had a rescue Timeout::Error somewhere to catch a process that I expected to timeout occasionally, and that was catching the Rack::Timeout::RequestTimeoutError. I don't understand what, why or how, but removing that timeout block (more precisely, the rescue Timeout::Error caused Rack::Timeout to function properly.