REST API timeout randomly

[Peter Pang]

I have been using Translation API from last month, I had a small python function on AWS Lambda calling the REST API in this way:

import urllib2
......

URL = "https://translation.googleapis.com/language/translate/v2?key=${myAPIKey}&source=${source}&target=${target}&q=${q}"
......

def translate(q, s, t):
    ......
    url = URL.replace('${source}',s).replace('${target}',t).replace('${q}',q)
    result = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
    ......

Very straightforward, nothing fancy. I am not using the google-cloud-python library because I need to host my function on AWS Lambda, the cloud library has way too many dependencies that make it impossible to work in AWS Lambda.

However, as I find out later in the log, this request timeout (30sec) once a while without any pattern. Once it started to fail, it failed continuously. But after a few hours, it went back to normal.

• Quota & load are definitely not the reason, since there are less than 100 call per day, and all of them are short phrases (less than 5 characters).
  
• The word & the language are definitely not the reason, since the same request works fine after a few hours.
• The requests were always sent from AWS Lambda in US East region, so I did not expect network connectivity to be the reason

 

I only saw one post back in 2015 asking about similar question (randomly timeout), and there were no clear answer then that apply to my case.

I hope to get some help from Google Support Team, I will need to use the Translation API a lot more very soon, and the frequent timeout (like almost every day) is going to be a big blocking issue to move on.

Regards,

P.P

[Adam]

Use a shorter timeout for your request and retry on failures, with a backoff:

...
request = urllib2.Request(url)
response = urllib2.urlopen(request, timeout=5)
...

In the turbulent realm of cloud APIs, where errors and timeouts can occur without warning, ultimately the best solution is to design your code to handle conditions in a robust way, especially for services like the Translation API which do not have a specific service level agreement.

[qian...@grabtaxi.com]

Hi Peter,

We have met the same issue. The QPS is much lower than the quota, but we still get around 5% timeout. Do you have any conclusion now?

Regard,

Qian

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