How does the test timeout property in x.properties file work?

[jkchua]

Good day, this may be a very simple question. For some context, I am currently trying to execute a Selenium test run using Gauge, and its current goal in the specification is to run tests against a large dataset (totalling 1,500 records) to verify the combinations in the user interface. I tried compressing the combination checks in one step in the specification, but it stopped after 583th record with a timeout error, which has been running for two hours already (I set the test_timeout property to 7200000 milliseconds).

My question is that, does the test_timeout property apply only in the context of steps (i.ei if the specific step took 2 hours to complete, it'll throw the timeout error) or does it apply on the whole Gauge run, regardless if I did complete the test run or not?

And if the latter is the case, is there any better way to approach a long-running test or a strategy to handle them?