I have an application where a user can upload a PDF using angular-file-upload.js
This library does not support file chunking: https://github.com/nervgh/angular-file-upload/issues/41
My elastic load balancer is configured to have an idle timeout of 10 seconds and other parts of the application depend on keeping this parameter.
The issue is if the file upload takes longer than 10 seconds the user receives a 504 Gateway Timeout in the browser and an error message. However, the file still reaches the server after some time.
How can I ignore or not show the user this 504 Gateway Timeout that comes from the ELB? Is there another way around this issue?
The issue you have is that an ELB is always going to close the connection unless it gets some traffic back from your server. See below from AWS docs. It's the same behaviour for an ALB or a Classic load balancer.
By default, Elastic Load Balancing sets the idle timeout to 60 seconds
for both connections. Therefore, if the instance doesn't send some
data at least every 60 seconds while the request is in flight, the
load balancer can close the connection. To ensure that lengthy
operations such as file uploads have time to complete, send at least 1
byte of data before each idle timeout period elapses, and increase the
length of the idle timeout period as needed.
So to get around this, you have two options:
Change the server processing to start sending some data back as soon as the connection is established, on an interval of less than 10 seconds.
Use another library for doing your uploads, or use vanilla javascript. There are plenty of examples out there, e.g. this one.
Edit: Third option
Thanks to #colde for making the valid point that you can simply work around your load balancer altogether. This has the added benefit of freeing up your server resources which get tied up with lengthy uploads. In our implementation of this we used pre-signed urls to securely achieve this.
Related
Google describes basic scaling like this:
I don't really have any other choice, as I'm using a B1 instance, so automatic scaling is not allowed.
That raises the question though, if I have an endpoint that takes a variable amount of time (could be minutes, could be hours), and I basically have to set an idle_timeout, will App Engine calculate idle_timeout from the time the request was made in the first place or when the app is done handling the request?
If the former is right, then it feels a bit unfair to have to guess how long requests will take when thread activity is a usable indicator of whether or not to initiate shutdown of an app.
Here you are mixing up two different terms.
idle_timeout is the time that the instance will wait before shutting down after receiving its last request
Request timeout is the amount of time that App Engine will wait for the return of a request from your app
As per the documentation:
Requests can run for up to 24 hours. A manually-scaled instance can
choose to handle /_ah/start and execute a program or script for many
hours without returning an HTTP response code. Task queue tasks can
run up to 24 hours.
Configuration:
We have iPlanet web server which sits before WebSphere portal 6.1 cluster (2) deployed in Linux machines.
When user tries to copy a 10 GB file across file systems (NFS mounted), we are using java run time to copy the file across to a different NFS mount, hoping that it would be faster than using any other java libraries.
proc = rt.exec("cp " + fileName + " " + outFileName);
Application deployed is a JSF portlet application.
a) session timeout is 60 mins on the app server and the application
b) we have an Ajax call from the client page to keep the session alive
User receives HTTP 500 within 3 minutes, while our logs show that file is still copying. Not sure why WebSphere is sending HTTP 500?
After 10 minutes are so file is copied, and when he clicks on refresh he can proceed.
Not sure what is causing this HTTP 500.
WebContainer threads are not supposed to be used for long tasks.
He's getting 500 after 3 minutes because that is the time WebSphere decides the thread is hung.
What you should be doing is using a WorkManager to perform that long task and the client can poll to check the status of the task.
If you consider upgrading to WAS v8/v8.5 in the near future a good idea will be to use Asynchronous Servlets for that
The reason that your client receives an HTTP 500 error after a few minutes can happen for a few reasons. Without a stack trace and some relevant logging, it is impossible to know which component within WebSphere "woke up" after 3 minutes and stopped everything. It might be WebSphere's timeout setting for the Web Container thread pool, or it can be some other timeout - should be easily concluded from the logs.
To fix this, you can do one of the following:
Adjust the relevant timeout value (depending, again, on which timeout it is exactly).
Change your design so long-running tasks are executed in the background. You can use WebSphere's Work Manager API for that, or asynchronous beans / servlets.
I am connecting to a 3rd party server on the following wsdl
http://webservices.ticketvala.com/axis2/services/WSTicketvala?wsdl
I am using JAX-WS to generate client code and call relevent method on 3rd party server. 3rd party server may take time between 15-25 seconds to send response.
It works fine on tomcat.
Now when i deploy this to GAE 1.5.3, often i get ScocketTimeoutException in less than 10 seconds. Sometimes it is succesfull taking even 20 seconds. I want to know why it fails many times. And any workaround to increase this response deadline time / to avoid this ScoketTimeOutException forever.
Similarly,
I have another RESTfull service at http://ticketgoose.com/bookbustickets/TGWSStationNameResponseAction.do?" +
"event=getStationDetails&password=123456&userId=ctshubws
I am connecting it through java.net.URL and many times i get TimeoutException. How can i raise this timeout limit to more than 30 seconds?
Thanks
Deepak
No user-initiated request can take more than 30 seconds to complete in Google App Engine:
http://code.google.com/intl/en/appengine/docs/java/runtime.html#The_Request_Timer
And a HTTP request to a external URL in a user-initiated request can't take more than 10 seconds to complete:
http://code.google.com/intl/en/appengine/docs/java/urlfetch/overview.html#Requests
If you need to do the overall work in more than 30 seconds and can do it in background (not needing to return the response directly via HTTP), use Task Queues. Note that the simplest way to do background work with tasks is to use the DeferredTask. And the best part: HTTP requests to external URLs on tasks can take up to 10 minutes to complete.
Can we start a dynamic backend programatically? mean while when a backend is starting how can i handle the request by falling back on the application(i mean app.appspot.com).
When i stop a backend manually in admin console, and send a request to it, its not starting "dynamically"
Dynamic backends come into existence when they receive a request, and
are turned down when idle; they are ideal for work that is
intermittent or driven by user activity.
Resident backends run continuously, allowing you to rely on the state
of their memory over time and perform complex initialization.
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/backends/overview.html
I recently started executing a long running task on a dynamic backend and noticed a dramatic increase in the performance of the frontends. I assume this was because the long running task was competing for resources with normal user requests.
Backends are documented quite thoroughly here. Backends have to be started and stopped with appcfg or the admin console, as documented here. A stopped backend will not handle requests - if you want this, you should probably be using the Task Queue instead.
It appears that a dynamic backend need not be explicitly stopped. The overvicew (http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/backends/overview.html) states that the billing for a dynamic backend stops 15 minutes after the last request is processed. So, if your app has a cron job, for example, that requires 5 minutes to complete, and needs to run every hour, then you could configure a backend to do this. The cost you'll incur is 15+5 minutes every hour, or 8 hours for the whole day. I suppose the free quota allows you 9 backend hours. So, this type of scenario would be free for you. The backend will start when you send your first request to it through a queue, and will stop 15 minutes after the last request you send is processed completely.
Will the response timer on google app engine start upon submitting the web page's form?
If I'm going to upload a file that is greater than 1MB, I could split the files to 1MB to fit in the limitation of the Google App Engine Datastore. Now, my concern is if the client's internet connection is slow, it would eat up the 30 seconds timer right? If this is the case, it is impossible to upload large files with slow connection?
The 30 second response time limit only applies to code execution. So the uploading of the actual file as part of the request body is excluded from that. The timer will only start once the request is fully sent to the server by the client, and your code starts handling the submitted request. Hence it doesn't matter how slow your client's connection is.
As an side note, Instead of splitting your file into multiple parts, try using the blobstore. I am using it for images and it raises the storage limit to 50MB. (Remember to enable billing to get access to the blobstore)