500 Internal Server Error

[Miroslav Čillík]

Hello,

in last two weeks I sometimes (quite often, but not always) get "500 Internal Server Error" response from GA Core Reporting API. Here's the response:

1/1 ServerException: Server error response [url] https://www.googleapis.com/analytics/v3/data/ga?ids=ga%3A38873833&dimensions=ga%3Asource%2Cga%3Acampaign%2Cga%3Amedium%2Cga%3Adate%2Cga%3ApagePath&metrics=ga%3Asessions&start-date=2014-11-13&end-date=2014-11-16&start-index=1&max-results=5000&prettyprint=1 [status code] 500 [reason phrase] Internal Server Error

This only happens on this particular account, and exponential backoff doesn't help much, I have set it like: 7 retry, total sum of waiting time is ~7 minutes.

I'm calling the API from PHP server application. I'm not using the PHP client library provided by GA, I wrote my own.

I suppose it's some glitch on the GA side. Any information about this will be appreciated. 

Thanks, Miro

[mschenkel]

I myself often see periods where I get 500 and 503 errors.  Most of the time it happens only for a period of a couple minutes and then resumes.  Never have I seen an instance where it lasted for more than 15 minutes.  I just assumed it was something on Google's side.

[Pete]

For a 500 or 503 you can retry but if it's always failing then you'll probably have to adjust the query (i.e. reduce complexity or time period) since the problem is likely a timeout. Continually retrying isn't going to fix the problem unless it is transient in nature.