A time limit on a search places an upper bound on the amount of time that the search operation will block waiting for the answers. This is useful when you don't want to wait too long for an answer. If the time limit specified is exceeded before the search operation can be completed, then a TimeLimitExceededException will be thrown.

To set the time limit of a search, pass the number of milliseconds to SearchControls.setTimeLimit(). The following example sets the time limit to 1 second.

// Set the search controls to limit the time to 1 second (1000 ms)
SearchControls ctls = new SearchControls();
ctls.setTimeLimit(1000);

To get this particular example to exceed its time limit, you need to reconfigure it to use either a slow server, or a server that has lots of entries. Alternatively, you can use other tactics to make the search take longer than 1 second.

A time limit of zero means that no time limit has been set and that calls to the directory will wait indefinitely for an answer.