Better to use a circuit breaker which supports the following set of features:

• Automatically time-out calls that take longer than a defined threshold.

• Maintain a small thread-pool (or semaphore) for each dependency and if it becomes full reject commands immediately, rather than queueing them up.

• Trip a circuit-breaker automatically or manually to stop all requests to a service for a period of time if the error percentage passes a threshold.

• Perform fallback logic when a request fails, is rejected, timed-out or short-circuited.

Hystrix also provides the following features:

• Measure successes and failures (exceptions thrown by the client), and timeouts.

• A dashboard to help diagnose issues.