API Timeouts - Help!

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#1

Mod edit:

@MattL91 Is this something you can help with?

Hello, I'm pudds, frequent user of the CFL API.

I have already sent a couple of emails to tech@cfl.ca but haven't received a response, so I'm hoping there is an admin or moderator here who can relay the message.

Since mid-February, I have been unable to get reliable results for certain requests, receiving 504 Gateway Timeouts from Cloudfront instead.

This appears to be a caching issue - some requests respond quickly, but those that fail, take around 90 seconds before the timeout limit is reached. If I try the same request several times, sometimes I can get it to go through, and if that happens, subsequent requests to the same URL are quick again (likely because they were successfully cached). This seems to mostly affect requests which contain filter criteria.

The API status dashboard shows no issues, but as this is a caching issue, I suspect that it may be a false negative - if those API requests are made regularly for monitoring purposes, they may be hitting the cache and masking the underlying issue.

Here are some API urls which are failing for me, and the cache request ID to accompany them (my key removed from the URL):

/v1/games/2021?key=mykey&filter[week][eq]=1 (request ID: 2MMAfGlKLCSq-4Pe5ojAm8b1iuNoHzDZKNodIpAW0FtuKK5hhl0pxg==)

/v1/games/2022?key=mykey&filter[week][eq]=1 (request ID: mhY_II1ufBAdWlISBjLTgZAik4D6szXf7Aritl7_-yEyIt-1rO1R_g==)

This request worked, but was very slow (1 minute, 21 seconds.)
/v1/games/2021?key=mykey&filter[week][eq]=2

Here is a screenshot of one of the error responses:

image
image973×417 29.3 KB

I'm really hoping the message can get passed along - I run a free fantasy football website (110yards.ca) and was making some changes in the offseason. The API being down for several weeks has made it impossible to continue development.

Thanks,
pudds

#2

Interesting development; I fired off a couple of requests before work this morning and things appear to be working. I'll check again this weekend to see if this is a fluke, or if it's actually been resolved.

Fingers crossed!

#3

Bad news - timeouts again on a new request.

Interesting that it was working at 8:29AM Central this morning though. Perhaps that useful information for whomever ends up working on this.

Failed request info for the request at 10:48AM Central:

URL: https://api.cfl.ca/v1/games/2021?key=mykey&filter[week][eq]=4

Request ID: moE18gvWTjTs3gjoj0eSN7Maf0TCLcunZoXa4Qu-RJFDlwjBWltSMw==

#4

Just another update to say that the API still appears to be acting up - I've managed to work around it by building my own caching layer, but many requests are still taking 30-90 seconds to complete.

#5

This might be a bit outside my skillset unfortunately...I believe our tech team is a little overwhelmed at the moment...

#6

Thanks for getting back to me, Matt. More than anything I just wanted to make sure someone knew there was an issue - the fact that it has lingered so long had me worried that it had gone undetected.