play-akka.actor.promises-dispatcher-# Cannot invoke the action, eventually got an error: Thrown(akka.pattern.AskTimeoutException: Timed out)

[Chris Burroughs]

We were experiencing a problem where collins would periodically return
5xx to most requests for a period of time. (We have server asset
'phone' home when chef runs.) The error message in the logs was just
something along the lines of:

play-akka.actor.promises-dispatcher-# Cannot invoke the action,
eventually got an error: Thrown(akka.pattern.AskTimeoutException: Timed out)

Google results will take you down a rabbit hole of async thread pools
and jdbc drivers, but in our case the problem was that LDAP auth was
timing out. Enabling the cache seems to have fixed the problem. If
anyone else experiences the same problem I hope this helps.