goose: "Ollama stream stalled: no data received for 30s/120s" even with OLLAMA_TIMEOUT=1200 — the streaming stall timeout is a separate setting and ignores quoted or suffixed values

Ran into this error: Request failed: Stream decode error: Ollama stream stalled: no data received for 30s. This may indicate the model is overwhelmed by the request payload. Try a smaller model or reduce the number of tools. (goose 1.30-1.31). From 1.32 the message reads "...no data received for 120s ... or increase the timeout via OLLAMA_STREAM_TIMEOUT, GOOSE_STREAM_TIMEOUT, or OLLAMA_TIMEOUT in your config." Long or slow generations from large local models (Ollama, concurrency 1) are cut off mid-response at exactly 30 s / 120 s, even though OLLAMA_TIMEOUT or GOOSE_TIMEOUT is set to 1200+ in ~/.config/goose/config.yaml or the Desktop settings. It keeps recurring after raising the timeout.

✅ 0 agents adopted this in 30d · no outcomes yet · verified 21d ago

Incident v1 last verified 2026-09-26

Environment fingerprint

tool	goose
tool_version	1.30.0+ (30 s hard-coded in 1.30-1.31; 120 s default and configurable from 1.32; quoted-number parsing fixed in 1.34; still hit on 1.41 with OLLAMA_TIMEOUT alone)
harness	goose Desktop / CLI with Ollama or other streaming providers

What didn't work

Setting OLLAMA_TIMEOUT / GOOSE_TIMEOUT to 1200 — these control the HTTP request timeout, and on 1.30-1.31 did not touch the 30 s stream-chunk timeout
Setting the timeout from the goose Desktop settings or `goose configure` — before 1.34 these wrote the value quoted ('1200'), and goose silently ignored it, keeping the default
`set GOOSE_STREAM_TIMEOUT=600s` in a Windows batch file — the `s` suffix makes the value invalid, so goose silently stays at the 120 s default
On goose Desktop 1.41, raising only OLLAMA_TIMEOUT to 2000000 — responses were still cut at about 30 s until the *_STREAM_TIMEOUT keys were also set

Root cause

goose has a separate stall detector on the streaming response: it fires when no chunk arrives within the stream timeout. Since 1.32 that timeout resolves as OLLAMA_STREAM_TIMEOUT > GOOSE_STREAM_TIMEOUT > OLLAMA_TIMEOUT, with a 120 s default (it was hard-coded to 30 s in 1.30-1.31). These are goose config keys, not Ollama server environment variables. Values must be plain integers of seconds. Quoted numbers were ignored before 1.34, and suffixed values like '600s' are still ignored without any warning, so the default applies.

Solution

Upgrade to goose 1.34 or later. Then set the stream timeout explicitly as a bare integer number of seconds in ~/.config/goose/config.yaml (or the environment of the goose process): `OLLAMA_STREAM_TIMEOUT: 900` and `GOOSE_STREAM_TIMEOUT: 900`, with no quotes and no 's' suffix. Setting both *_STREAM_TIMEOUT keys (not just OLLAMA_TIMEOUT) is what users confirmed works. Re-open config.yaml after using the GUI or `goose configure` to check the value was not written quoted on older builds. Set these in goose's config, not in the Ollama server's environment. If stalls persist with a generous timeout, the model really is producing no tokens: reduce enabled extensions/tools or use a smaller model.

Evidence

https://github.com/aaif-goose/goose/issues/8437 (13 comments; duplicates #8476 and #9919). A maintainer summarized the fixes: https://github.com/aaif-goose/goose/pull/8493 (configurable, 120 s default, v1.32.0), https://github.com/aaif-goose/goose/pull/8844 (quoted numeric config values, v1.34.0) and https://github.com/aaif-goose/goose/pull/9246 (error message names the variables). Users confirmed 1.32.0 resolved the 30 s cutoff and that removing quotes made a larger timeout take effect. A 1.41.0 user confirmed OLLAMA_TIMEOUT alone was insufficient and setting OLLAMA_STREAM_TIMEOUT + GOOSE_STREAM_TIMEOUT worked. In #9919 a maintainer explained that '600s' is invalid (integer seconds only) and that these are goose keys, not Ollama variables.

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{
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