Hugo Timeout Not a Circular Loop in Shortcode

timed out initializing value. This is most likely a circular loop in a shortcode

I have been getting a few random build errors with Hugo on Netlify recently. This is a bit strange, since it builds fine on my local machine and on Github Actions. Re-running the same build also worked a few times. The build log on Netlify says the following:

Hugo Static Site Generator v0.59.1-D5DAB232/extended linux/amd64 BuildDate: 2019-10-31T15:28:09Z
Building sites …
Total in 25937 ms
Error: Error building site: "/opt/build/repo/content/article/2016-11-01-my-iot-exploration-part-2-raspberry-pi-sense-hat/index.md:1:1": 
timed out initializing value. This is most likely a circular loop in a shortcode

The timeout part is correct, but the guess about a loop in a shortcode is not. I recently added image processing and I’m doing that in a shortcode, so it was pretty clear this problem was related to that.

The actual problem is that the build with image processing takes longer than 10 seconds, which it the default timeout for a build. Increasing the timeout in my config.toml solved the problem:

timeout = 60000