The 1-Second Timeout Hack: Running Infinite Parallel Workloads Natively on Google Apps Script
Abstract
This paper presents a serverless architecture that overcomes the stateless nature and 6-minute execution limit of Google Apps Script (GAS). By configuring a 1-second immediate timeout in UrlFetchApp loopback calls, an orchestrator dispatches background tasks and terminates immediately. This design frees up the caller’s execution quota while the target Web App runs to completion in an isolated container. Combined with a transactional Google Sheets state machine, this design supports self-perpetuating parallel MapReduce runs and multi-turn, state-hydrated generative AI agent networks without external compute infrastructure.