Google Translate API timing out

[Google Api User BB]

Hi

I have recently (in the last two days) seen that an increased number of timeout errors as a result of the callouts to the translate API.

Could the timeout be related to my account reaching the daily 2M character limit? Or if this is an issue with the Google Translate service then has anyone else experienced similar issues in the last 48 hours?

Is it possible to find out the underlying issue? (I would like to direct this question to Google API support - I cannot find any contact details for Support)

Regards and thanks

Google API User

[Jesse Scherer (Google Cloud Support)]

Hi, you're in the right place; folks from Support and the Translate API team hang out on this list.

If you do hit your daily 2M character limit, you should get Quota Exceeded responses. Are you seeing that, or just timeouts in your code? Does raising your quota change the behavior in any way?

Timeouts are usually a symptom of network issues between you and Google. What does a traceroute from you to Google show? If you ping google.com for a while, do you see any dropped packets?

Regarding quota, you can check the remaining quota in the developer console. You can also check to see if the API is sending any errors. This is visible in https://console.developers.google.com/project/<PROJECT>/apiui/apiview/translate/usage

Thanks for any other information you can provide.

Regards,

Jesse

[Google Api User BB]

Hi Jesse

Thanks for your reply. The issue is happening with our colleagues in Asia. I tried pinging the google api (Im in the UK) and all seems fine. I can try again the next time I see the timeouts in the error logs but i may not be hitting the same server as my colleagues in Asia.

The timeouts are random in nature in terms of the timings during the day when they have happened, which makes me think that it is possibly not the character limit.  Also, if the character limit were reached, the api would not have worked after the error for that day. So, I have discarded that possibility for now.

As for a response, none is received when these errors have occurred.

I will have a look at the dev console for errors as you suggested to see if I can find out more.

Thanks very much for your help.