Getting timeouts constantly when sending RESTRequests to server - rest

I am sending requests (post and get) with Delphi's TRESTClient and TRESTRequest to a webserver. Said server is being developed by someone else.
When sending requests to the API I am getting timeouts seemingly randomly and often.
The strange thing is that this only seems to be happening when making the requests with Delphi. When using a fresh, empty project and just placing the components the timeouts still occur. When using Postman no timeouts occur, even if I send the requests as fast as possible (I thought at first that maybe too many requests were sent too quickly, but I cannot replicate this behavior in Postman and I sometimes get timeouts even on the first request sent).
Since searching the internet didn't turn up anything about it I am at a loss.
Has anyone ever experienced something like this? If not, how could I move forward to find the cause of the problem?
Edit: The problem has returned and I was able to narrow it down a bit more:
When sending a post request, the request is getting processed by the webserver, but I get a timeout on the client side waiting for a response. The dev working on the server is looking into it on his end.
Strangely a similar thing happens with post requests expecting a response to a different server, which makes me think that the problem is on my end after all (especially considering Postman is working fine)

Related

response of request hangs and resolves after awhile

i have an issue with a backend service in a microservice architecture using Kubernetes.
sometimes when i make a request to the service on postman or frontend, it will hang for very long until it timeouts whether the request is a big or small one, and this behaviour will last for a minute or so before it auto resolves and requests respond at normal speeds.
my team is figuring what the problem is. we suspect the source of the problem could come from Kubernetes or postgresql.
hope if someone has some insight into this. tq!

Eclipse Milo - writeValue(NodeId, DataValue) is very slow

We are successfully communicating to OPC UA server reading and setting tags. Everything works fine but only issue now is that writing tag value takes a long time around 600ms per tag. So to set 10 tags it takes around 6 seconds which is unacceptable in production environment...please suggest.
How long a write takes is almost always the responsibility of the server, not the client, so there is probably not much else you can do on the Milo client side other than make sure to batch your writes into a single call whenever possible, which it sounds like you are already doing.
You could verify this for yourself by connecting without encryption, capturing the traffic in Wireshark, and verifying that the delay you see is between the request being sent from the client and the response being received from the server.

Socket has timed out

We are trying to access our web-app (through web server, IHS). When we use http we are fine ;https protocol is working as it submits the requests, however we observe Socket Time Out Exception continuously after some requests have been processed. Thereafter the request processing resumes again. We have tested the application with quite large concurrent load using https earlier; but in this case we are not sure why we are getting this error.
Oh boy, this can be due to thousands of different things. I would suggest a layer analysis approach starting off by the Web Server logs, you need to make sure the requests are reaching your web server and what is happening to the ones dictating a time out, you could be facing anything from network latency to a resource bounded host, contention or who knows, it all depends on your application's design.
Start off by checking out the network layer. Maybe if you provide some more information I can help you out.
Also check out http and https time out configurations on your web server.

RequestBuilder timeouts and browser connection limits per domain

This is specifically about GWT's RequestBuilder, but should apply to general XHR as well. My company is having me build a near realtime chat application over HTTP. Yes, I do realize there are better ways to do chat aplications, but this is what they want. Eventually we want it working on the iPad/iPhone as well so flash is out, which rules out websockets and comet as well, I think?
Anyway, I'm running into issues were I've set GWT's RequestBuilder timeout to 10 seconds and we get very random and sporadic timeouts. We've got error handling and emailing on the server side and never get any errors, which suggests the underlying XHR request that RequestBuilder is built on, never gets to the server and times out after 10 seconds.
We're using these request to poll the server for new messages rather often and also for sending new messages to the server and also polling (less frequently) for other parts of application. What I'm afraid of is that we're running into the browsers limit on concurrent connections to the same domain (2 for IE by default?).
Now my question is - If I construct a RequestBuilder and call it's send() method and the browser blocks it from sending until one of the 2 connections per domain is free, does the timeout still start while the request is being blocked or will it not start until the browser actually releases the underlying XHR?
I hope that's clear, if not please let me know and I'll try to explain more.
On the GWT Incubator doc page is an article explaining server push.
With said technique you only hold one connection open all the time.
Browsers allowed only 2 connections per hostname; that has now changed. 'Modern' browsers allow upto 6 simultaneous connections - it varies between browsers. See http://www.browserscope.org/ - network tab.
As regards the timer, it starts before GWT invokes xhr.send(), so your suspicion is right. See Request.java and RequestBuilder.java if you want to trace it out.
Seems like half the time, you answer your own question as soon as you post it.
Via: http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/javadoc/1.6/com/google/gwt/http/client/package-summary.html
Pending Request Limit
- Modern web browsers are limited to having only two HTTP requests outstanding at any one time. If your server experiences an error that prevents it from sending a response, it can tie up your outstanding requests. If you are concerned about this, you can always set timeouts for the request via RequestBuilder.setTimeoutMillis(int).

What is a RESTful way of monitoring a REST resource for changes?

If there is a REST resource that I want to monitor for changes or modifications from other clients, what is the best (and most RESTful) way of doing so?
One idea I've had for doing so is by providing specific resources that will keep the connection open rather than returning immediately if the resource does not (yet) exist. For example, given the resource:
/game/17/playerToMove
a "GET" on this resource might tell me that it's my opponent's turn to move. Rather than continually polling this resource to find out when it's my turn to move, I might note the move number (say 5) and attempt to retrieve the next move:
/game/17/move/5
In a "normal" REST model, it seems a GET request for this URL would return a 404 (not found) error. However, if instead, the server kept the connection open until my opponent played his move, i.e.:
PUT /game/17/move/5
then the server could return the contents that my opponent PUT into that resource. This would both provide me with the data I need, as well as a sort of notification for when my opponent has moved without requiring polling.
Is this sort of scheme RESTful? Or does it violate some sort of REST principle?
Your proposed solution sounds like long polling, which could work really well.
You would request /game/17/move/5 and the server will not send any data, until move 5 has been completed. If the connection drops, or you get a time-out, you simply reconnect until you get a valid response.
The benefit of this is it's very quick - as soon as the server has new data, the client will get it. It's also resilient to dropped connections, and works if the client is disconnected for a while (you could request /game/17/move/5 an hour after it's been moved and get the data instantly, then move onto move/6/ and so on)
The issue with long polling is each "poll" ties up a server thread, which quickly breaks servers like Apache (as it runs out of worker-threads, so can't accept other requests). You need a specialised web-server to serve the long-polling requests.. The Python module twisted (an "an event-driven networking engine") is great for this, but it's more work than regular polling..
In answer to your comment about Jetty/Tomcat, I don't have any experience with Java, but it seems they both use a similar pool-of-worker-threads system to Apache, so it will have that same problem. I did find this post which seems to address exactly this problem (for Tomcat)
I'd suggest a 404, if your intended client is a web browser, as keeping the connection open can actively block browser requests in the client to the same domain. It's up to the client how often to poll.
2021 Edit: The answer above was in 2009, for context.
Today, I would suggest using a WebSocket interface with push notifications.
Alternatively, in the above suggestion, I might suggest holding the connection for 500-1000ms and check twice at the server before returning the 404, to reduce the overhead of creating multiple connections at the client.
I found this article proposing a new HTTP header, "When-Modified-After", that essentially does the same thing--the server waits and keeps the connection open until the resource is modified.
I prefer a version-based approach rather than a timestamp-based approach, since it's less prone to race conditions and gives you a little more information about what it is you're retrieving. Any thoughts to this approach?