What are the best practices to prevent 'command execution timeout' errors in applications?

Prevention strategies include: 1. **Optimize queries and code:** Ensure database queries are efficient, use appropriate indexes, and application logic minimizes I/O and processing time. 2. **Asynchronous processing:** For long-running tasks, offload them to background processes or message queues to avoid blocking the main thread. 3. **Implement pagination and batching:** Process large datasets in smaller, manageable chunks. 4. **Monitor system resources:** Proactively monitor CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network usage to identify bottlenecks. 5. **Tune timeout settings appropriately:** Adjust default timeout values only after performance optimization, setting them to a reasonable duration based on expected command execution times, rather than arbitrarily increasing them. 6. **Database maintenance:** Regularly perform database maintenance tasks such as rebuilding indexes and updating statistics.