Connection timeouts when sending GCM messages

[Dmitry Trunin]

Hello

Few days ago we have started to experience regular problems sending GCM messages from our servers via https://android.googleapis.com/gcm/send. At some random time GCM service stops to respond normally and part of requests fail with connection timeout (timeout is set to 2 seconds). This causes significant throughput degradation of sending messages. This degradation lasts for some time (from 5 minutes to few hours), and then GCM service starts to work normally again. We observed this several times:

October 6th, 15:35 - 18:00 (GMT)

October 5th, 15:40

October 4th, 17:20 - 18:45

October 2nd, 15:20 - 19:40

September 30th, 17:15 - 17:25

Graph below show the number of successfully sent GCM messages per 5 minutes on normal day and on day when we experienced connection timeouts.

What can be the reason of connection timeouts and how to deal with it? 

Best regards

Dmitry Trunin

[Costin Manolache]

In general, I would suggest using at least 5 second timeout. 

Could you also check the IP address you get for android.googleapis.com, and do a ping when this happens ? 

I'm not seeing any unusual latency spike on our side - there are occasional spikes to ~800ms, but 

only in individual DCs, global latency seems pretty smooth.

As usual, please make sure you retry with exponentially backoff and don't cache DNS records for too long.

Costin

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