One of three exceptions can occur when you attempt a read operation in the store. The first of these is ConsistencyException. This exception indicates that the operation cannot be completed because the consistency policy cannot be met. For more information, see Consistency Guarantees.

The second exception is RequestTimeoutException. This means that the operation could not be completed within the amount of time provided by the store's timeout property. This probably indicates a store that is attempting to service too many read requests all at once. Remember that your data is partitioned across the shards in your store, with the partitioning occurring based on the major path components in your keys. If you designed your keys such that a large number of read requests are occurring against a single key, you could see request timeouts even if some of the shards in your store are idle.

A request timeout could also be indicative of a network problem that is causing the network to be slow or even completely unresponsive.

To handle a RequestTimeoutException, you could simply log the error and move on, or you could pause for a short period of time and then retry the operation. You could also retry the operation, but use a longer timeout value. (There is a version of the KVStore.get() method that allows you to specify a timeout value for that specific operation.)

Finally, you can receive a general FaultException, which indicates that some exception occurred which is neither a problem with consistency nor a problem with the request timeout. Your only recourse here is to either log the error and move along, or retry the operation.