Why Azure VM is not receiving a HTTP GET response? - azure

I've encountered an interesting problem when trying to make a HTTP request from Azure VM. It appears that when the request is ran from this VM the response never arrives. I tried using a custom C# code that makes an HTTP request and Postman. In both cases we can see in the logs on the target API side that the response has been sent, but no data is received on the origin VM. The exact same C# request and Postman request work outside of this VM in multiple networks and machines. The only tool that actually works for this request on VM side is Curl Bash terminal but it is not an option based on current requirements.
Tried on multiple Azure VM sizes, on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019.
The target API is on-premise hosted and it requires around 5 minutes for the data to be sent back. Payload is very small but due to the computing performed on the API side it takes a while to generate. Modifying this API is not an option.
So to be clear- the requests are perpetually stuck until the timeout on client side is reached (if it was configured). Does anybody know what could be a reason for this?

If these transfers take longer than 4 minutes without keep alives, Azure will typically close the connection.
You should be able to see this by monitoring the connection with wireshark.
TCP Timeouts can be configured when using a Load Balancer, but you can also try adding keep alives in your API server if possible.

Related

SignalR long polling repeatedly calls /negotiate and /hub POST and returns 404 occasionally on Azure Web App

We have enabled SignalR on our ASP.NET Core 5.0 web project running on an Azure Web App (Windows App Service Plan). Our SignalR client is an Angular client using the #microsoft/signalr NPM package (version 5.0.11).
We have a hub located at /api/hub/notification.
Everything works as expected for most of our clients, the web socket connection is established and we can call methods from client to server and vice versa.
For a few of our clients, we see a massive amount of requests to POST /api/hub/notification/negotiate and POST /api/hub/notification within a short period of time (multiple requests per minute per client). It seems like that those clients switch to long polling instead of using web sockets since we see the POST /api/hub/notification requests.
We have the suspicion that the affected clients could maybe sit behind a proxy or a firewall which forbids the web sockets and therefore the connection switches to long polling in the first place.
The following screenshot shows requests to the hub endpoints for one single user within a short period of time. The list is very long since this pattern repeats as long as the user has opened our website. We see two strange things:
The client repeatedly calls /negotiate twice every 15 seconds.
The call to POST /notification?id=<connectionId> takes exactly 15 seconds and the following call with the same connection ID returns a 404 response. Then the pattern repeats and /negotiate is called again.
For testing purposes, we enabled only long polling in our client. This works for us as expected too. Unfortunately, we currently don't have access to the browsers or the network of the users where this behavior occurs, so it is hard for us to reproduce the issue.
Some more notes:
We currently have just one single instance of the Web App running.
We use the Redis backplane for a scale-out scenario in future.
The ARR affinity cookie is enabled and Web Sockets in the Azure Web App are enabled too.
The Web App instance doesn't suffer from high CPU usage or high memory usage.
We didn't change any SignalR options except of adding the Redis backplane. We just use services.AddSignalR().AddStackExchangeRedis(...) and endpoints.MapHub<NotificationHub>("/api/hub/notification").
The website runs on HTTPS.
What could cause these repeated calls to /negotiate and the 404 returns from the hub endpoint?
How can we further debug the issue without having access to the clients where this issue occurs?
Update
We now implemented a custom logger for the #microsoft/signalr package which we use in the configureLogger() overload. This logger logs into our Application Insights which allows us to track the client side logs of those clients where our issue occurs.
The following screenshot shows a short snippet of the log entries for one single client.
We see that the WebSocket connection fails (Failed to start the transport "WebSockets" ...) and the fallback transport ServerSentEvents is used. We see the log The HttpConnection connected successfully, but after pretty exactly 15 seconds after selecting the ServerSentEvents transport, a handshake request is sent which fails with the message from the server Server returned handshake error: Handshake was canceled. After that some more consequential errors occur and the connection gets closed. After that, the connection gets established again and everything starts from new, a new handshare error occurs after those 15 seconds and so on.
Why does it take so long for the client to send the handshake request? It seems like those 15 seconds are the problem, since this is too long for the server and the server cancels the connection due to a timeout.
We still think that this has maybe something to to with the client's network (Proxy, Firewall, etc.).
Fiddler
We used Fiddler to block the WebSockets for testing. As expected, the fallback mechanism starts and ServerSentEvents is used as transport. Opposed to the logs we see from our issue, the handshake request is sent immediately and not after 15 seconds. Then everything works as expected.
You should check which pricing tier you use, Free or Standard in your project.
You should change the connectionstring which is in Standard Tier. If you still use Free tier, there are some restrictions.
Official doc: Azure SignalR Service limits

ForEach Bulk Post Requests are failing

I have this script where I'm taking a large dataset and calling a remote api, using request-promise, using a post method. If I do this individually, the request works just fine. However, if I loop through a sample set of 200-records using forEach and async/await, only about 6-15 of the requests come back with a status of 200, the others are returning with a 500 error.
I've worked with the owner of the API, and their logs only show the 200-requests. So I don't think node is actually sending out the ones that come back as 500.
Has anyone run into this, and/or know how I can get around this?
To my knowledge, there's no code in node.js that automatically makes a 500 http response for you. Those 500 responses are apparently coming from the target server's network. You could look at a network trace on your server machine to see for sure.
If they are not in the target server logs, then it's probably coming from some defense mechanism deployed in front of their server to stop misuse or overuse of their server (such as rate limiting from one source) and/or to protect its ability to respond to a meaningful number of requests (proxy, firewall, load balancer, etc...). It could even be part of a configuration in the hosting facility.
You will likely need to find out how many simultaneous requests the target server will accept without error and then modify your code to never send more than that number of requests at once. They could also be measuring requests/sec to it might not only be an in-flight count, but could be the rate at which requests are sent.

AWS RDS seems to only process 3 requests at a time

I've got a laravel service that loads a reactjs page that fires off around 30+ axios calls after loading. When I look at the source tab, it looks like only 3 of the calls are being processed at a time.
I'm testing this by connecting to the AWS RDS instance from my local environment. I tried using a db.t3.medium and a db.t3.large with no noticeable change.
The applicate has multiple database connections. Each requests uses all three connection to gather the required data. All of the requests execute the exact same query from one database and then each of the requests executes a query on a different table in the second database.
Is there a reason why AWS isn't processing all of my requests simultaneously?
You aren’t looking at the good performance indicator. You are looking at your browser network console. Your browser limits the number of request it can do on the same host simultaneously.
You can find more information here: Max parallel http connections in a browser?

How Request and Response will got process in service stack?

I am using service stack to build the create RESTful services, not have depth knowledge of it. This works as sending request and getting response back. I have scenario and my question is depends on it.
Scenario: I am sending request from browser or any client where I am able to send request to server. Consider server will take 3 seconds to process single request and send back response to browser. After one second, I have sent another request to server from same browser(client). Now I am getting response of second request which I sent later.
Question 1: What is happening behind with the first request which I did not get response.
Question 2: How I can stop processing of orphan request.
Edit : I have used IIS server to host services.
ServiceStack executes requests concurrently on multithreaded web servers, whether you're hosting on ASP.NET/IIS or self-hosted so 2 concurrent requests are running concurrently on different threads. There are different scenarios possible if you're executing async tasks in your Services in which it frees up the thread to execute different tasks, but the implementation details are largely irrelevant here.
HTTP Web Requests are each executed to their end, even when its client connection is lost your Services are never notified and no Exceptions are raised.
But for long running Services you can enable the high-level ServiceStack's Cancellable Requests Feature which enables a way for clients to cancel long running requests.

node.js built in support for handling requests for same data

In my node.js server app I'm providing a service to my js client that performs some handling of remote api's.
It might very well be possible that two different clients request the same information. Say client 1 requests information, then before client 1's request is fully handled (remote api's didn't returns their response yet) client 2 is requesting the same data. What I'd want to is to wait for client 1 data to be ready and then write it to both client 1 and 2.
This seems to me like a very common issue and I was wondering if there was any library or built-in support in connect or express that supports this issue.
You might not want to use HTTP for providing the data to the client. Reasons:
If the remote API is taking a lot of time to process you will risk the client request to timeout, or the browser to repeat the request.
You will have to share some state between requests which is not a good practice.
Have a look at websockets (socket.io would be a place to start). With them you can push data from the server to the client. In your scenario, clients will perform the request to the server, which will return 202 and when the remote API will respond, the server will push the data to the clients using websockets.

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