We recently switched our system to a heartbeat system instead of a timeout system. The testing framework expects to see messages (printf, console.log, etc...) often. So a test testing a bunch of combinations might take 45 seconds to run but for each combination it's printing "PASS: Combination 1, 2, 3" every few ms.

This way the framework can kill the test if it doesn't see one of these messages in a short amount of time.

This fixed our timeout issues. We had tests that took too long, specially in debug builds and we'd end up having to set too large a timeout. Now though, we can keep the timeout for the heartbeat really short and our timeout issues have mostly gone away.