I’m a big fan of Stack Overflow and I tend to contribute regularly (am currently in the top 0.X%). In this category (stackoverflow) of posts I will will be posting my top rated questions and answers. This, btw, is allowed as explained in the meta thread here.

My question was:

I was wondering if there is a way to set the setTimeout function to different timeout on the fly.

So, for example I check something every 1 second, but if I don’t get an expected result in like 10 seconds I want to “reconfigure” this setTimeout to wait 3 seconds instead of 1.

Here is my code:

var br = 0;
var waitInterval = 1000;
var sleepInterval = 2000;

var waitForNewRace = setInterval(
function checkForNewRace(){
    if ( $("#data").html() == "1"){        
        $("#res").html("got it!");
    }
    else{
        $("#counter").html(br);
        if (br++ > 9)
            waitInterval = 3000;            
    }                   

    $("#tst").html(waitInterval);
},
waitInterval
);

If you want to check it out here is the mentioned code on jsfiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/Hitman666/Vyczj/2/

 The answer, by KooiInc, was:

You have to stop the interval and restart it. See this fork of your jsfiddle.

EDIT: I’ve copied your code here in case something happens with your jsfiddle code:

var br = 0;
var waitInterval = 1000;
var sleepInterval = 2000;


function checkForNewRace(){
    if ( $("#data").html() == "1"){        
        $("#res").html("got it!");
    }
    else{
        $("#counter").html(br);
        if (br++ > 5){
            clearInterval(waitForNewRace);
            waitInterval += 1000;
            if (waitInterval > 10000)
                waitInterval = 10000;

            waitForNewRace = setInterval(
                 checkForNewRace,
                 waitInterval
            );  
        }
    }                   
    $("#tst").html(waitInterval);
}

var waitForNewRace = setInterval(
    checkForNewRace,
    waitInterval
);