Time outs - anyone else having a problem?

[Phil]

When pushing in Adgroups/Keyword/Text Ads I am getting alot of time-
outs when communicating with Google. Previously (about two weeks ago)
I was doing a similar level of 'work' but not getting so many time
outs.
My code hasn't change, has Google changed policy?

[AdWords API Advisor]

Hello Phil,

Could you elaborate a bit on the timeouts you're seeing? Do you have
any indication whether the timeouts are imposed in your client code
(e.g. your HTTP connection library closes the connection after X
seconds), or whether your client code keeps waiting but the connection
is closed on our end? Is there a specific number of seconds after the
request was made after which the timeout always occurs?

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, AdWords API Team

[Phil]

I will elaborate as much as I can at this point, but as the API costs
money to use I will have to wait till the next run to get more
details. The same problem does not occur in the sandbox. I have also
been warned off judging speed issues of the production API against the
sandbox.

I am running a multi threaded push of new adgroups (an adgroup is
pushed in, then keywords and text ads for same). This works all very
nicely until 'sets' begin to time out. Then after a short period of
time (I would have said 5-10 adgroups timing out) everything stars to
work again. Out of 114 adgroups I lost about 20. These, when pushed in
again, went in no problem. The timeouts probably take about 30seconds.
I have had the problem where the connection is closed at your end
(that comes up as a soap exception i believe). It could well be the
client library (v1.3 for .net downloaded around these parts). I would
be reticent to up the limit because the same code has been working for
about 6 weeks and has only now started to have the problem. Also, if
it takes over 30seconds there is more of a problem than my code
needing to wait a little longer.

Thank you for your response.
Phil.

On Apr 21, 6:20 pm, AdWords API Advisor <adwordsapiadvi...@google.com>
wrote:

[AdWords API Advisor]

Hello Phil,

If you're using .NET then the info at the bottom of this thread might
be useful:

http://groups.google.com/group/adwords-api/browse_thread/thread/520a49dbfb717ccd

I can't personally vouch for those settings, but I believe that Peer
has been using them for a while now and they have made a difference in
the reliability of his SOAP requests. I don't see anything specific
about timeouts there, but the timeout settings for .NET web requests
are documented at

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.webrequest.timeout(VS.80).aspx

I admit that it does sound strange that adding a single ad group
would take over 30 seconds. Changing any the settings mentioned above
might help alleviate the problem, but I'm also curious as to why your
requests would be taking that long to complete. It's a little
difficult to cross reference this particular type of issue with our
logs, though, because on your end there's no response received (which
would normally include an identifier that we could look up) and on our
end it most likely looks like the request succeeded.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, AdWords API Team

[Phil]

Hi Jeff,
Thank you for the links. I will investigate.
The strange thing for me is that all this was working fine, and
nothing has changed at this end. Then all of a sudden we get patches
of time outs.
When I run next I will look into this further.

Cheers
Phil.

On Apr 22, 4:34 pm, AdWords API Advisor <adwordsapiadvi...@google.com>
wrote:
> Hello Phil,
>

>  If you're using .NET then the info at the bottom of this thread might
> be useful:
>

>  http://groups.google.com/group/adwords-api/browse_thread/thread/520a4...

>
> I can't personally vouch for those settings, but I believe that Peer
> has been using them for a while now and they have made a difference in
> the reliability of his SOAP requests. I don't see anything specific
> about timeouts there, but the timeout settings for .NET web requests
> are documented at
>

>  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.webrequest.timeout...

[Phil]

NEW!
OK, so yesterday (28/04/09) Half of my adgroups went in, the other
half timed out. Then, I reran in the failed half and they went in
fine.
Could it be that Google is blocking me after a certain number of calls
in a specific timescale?
If so, this must be a new limit because as of 3 weeks ago the numbers
I was pushing in were higher - but I had, maybe, 1 timeout per push.

Is there a new hit limit on the API?

Phil.

[AdWords API Advisor]

Hello Phil,

Well, it's possible to get rate limited if you make an excessive
number of requests over a long enough period of time, but I think
you'd have a hard time doing it if you're just adding a hundred ad
groups one at a time.

When you say that half of the ad groups failed, did you manage to
check to see if there was a specific number of seconds after the
request was initially made that each of the requests timed out?

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, AdWords API Team