We have a setup with several RESTful APIs on the same VM in Azure.
The websites run in Kestrel on IIS.
They are protected by the azure application gateway with firewall.
We now have requests that would run for at least 20 minutes.
The request run the full length uninterrupted on Kestrel (Visible in the logs) but the sender either get "socket hang up" after exactly 5 minutes or run forever even if the request finished in kestrel. The request continue in Kestrel even if the connection was interrupted for the sender.
What I have done:
Wrote a small example application that returns after a set amount of
seconds to exclude our websites being the problem.
Ran the request in the VM (to localhost): No problems, response was received.
Ran the request within Azure from one to another VM: Request ran forever.
Ran the request from outside of Azure: Request terminates after 5 minutes
with "socket hang up".
Checked set timeouts: Kestrel: 50m , IIS: 4000s, ApplicationGateway-HttpSettings: 3600
Request were tested with Postman,
Is there another request or connection timeout hidden somewhere in Azure?
We now have requests that would run for at least 20 minutes.
This is a horrible architecture and it should be rewritten to be async. Don't take this personally, it is what it is. Consider returning a 202 Accepted with a Location header to poll for the result.
You're most probably hitting the Azure SNAT layer timeout —
Change it under the Configuration blade for the Public IP.
So I ran into something like this a little while back:
For us the issue was probably the timeout like the other answer suggests but the solution was (instead of increasing timeout) to add PGbouncer in front of our postgres database to manage the connections and make sure a new one is started before the timeout fires.
Not sure what your backend connection looks like but something similar (backend db proxy) could work to give you more ability to tune connection / reconnection on your side.
For us we were running AKS (azure Kubernetes service) but all azure public ips obey the same rules that cause issues similar to this one.
While it isn't an answer I know there are also two types of public IP addresses, one of them is considered 'basic' and doesn't have the same configurability, could be something related to the difference between basic and standard public ips / load balancers?
Related
We have a service which pings our EP1 Premium service and yesterday we received 3 client side timeout errors after 2 minutes of waiting. When opening the trace in App insights, these requests which time out are not even logged and have no trace of ever being received Azure side, and therefore stay unanswered. By looking at the metrics provided in the Azure Functions app, I found out that 1-2 minutes after the request has been sent, the app loses all its ability to work as its Total App Domains falls to 0 as well as all connections, threads and so on and this state lasts until the next request is received, therefore "skipping" the request that happened beforehand. This is a big issue as I need to make sure requests get answered in a timely manner.
The client service sent HTTP requests to the Azure Functions app expecting an answer, only to time out while the Azure-side doesn't have any record of ever receiving the request.
I believe this issues is related to Consumption Plan of Azure Functions called Cold Start behaviour. The "skipping" mechanism is explained below:
Apps may scale to zero when idle, meaning some requests may have additional latency at startup. The consumption plan does have some optimizations to help decrease cold start time, including pulling from pre-warmed placeholder functions that already have the function host and language processes running.https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-scale#cold-start-behavior
Please also consider of having look on this article, which explains the behaviour. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/understanding-serverless-cold-start/
I recently deployed a Node.js Backend Service to Azure and have the following problem. The service becomes unresponsive after a certain amount of time, and only comes back to life if a external request is sent. The problem is, that it takes about 3 minutes for the Container to start back up and actually return the request. I'm running Node 14 LTS. I also added a health check yesterday, but azure simply doesn't bother actually keeping the app alive, here is the metric off azure
I verified azure is actually trying to reach the correct endpoint, and it does. I also have "Always On" enabled. I also verified that the app itself, is not crashing. I log every request and all of a sudden requests are no longer received, which means the health endpoint doesn't respond either, but it does not result in a container restart. It just waits for an external request to appear and then decides to start everything back up, which takes too long.
I feel like it's some kind of configuration issue, because the app itself is not very complex and I never experienced crashes when doing local development.
The official document tells us that the Free pricing tier you are currently using, Always on does not take effect.
How do I decrease the response time for the first request after idle time?
I have an app service (plan B2) running on Azure.
My integration tests running from docker container are calling some app service endpoints one by one and sometimes receive 500 or 502 error.
When I debug tests I make some pauses between calls and all requests work successfully. Also, when I scale up my app service, everything works properly.(I don't want to scale up because cpu and other params are low.)
In my tests I have only one HttpClient and I dispose it at the end so I don't think there should be any connections leaks.
Also, in TCP Connections I have around 60 total connections while in Azure docs the limit is 1,920.
This app is not accessed by any users but here it says that I had the maximum connections. Is there any way how can I track these connections? Why when I receive these 5xx errors I don't see anything in app insights? Also how 15 connections can exceed the limit when the limit is 1920? Are these connections related to my errors and how they can be fixed?
You don't see them in Application Insights because they're happening at IIS level which is breaking the request, and because of that, data is not being sent to Application Insights.
The place to look for information is "Diagnose and solve problems", then "Availability and Performance". More info in here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/overview-diagnostics
PS: I do think the problem is related to the Dispose of your HTTPClient. It's a well known issue and the reason why they've introduced HttpClientFactory. More info in here:
https://www.stevejgordon.co.uk/httpclient-creation-and-disposal-internals-should-i-dispose-of-httpclient
https://stackoverflow.com/a/15708633/1384539
We have a stateless (with shared Azure Redis Cache) WebApp that we would like to automatically scale via the Azure auto-scale service. When I activate the auto-scale-out, or even when I activate 3 fixed instances for the WebApp, I get the opposite effect: response times increase exponentially or I get Http 502 errors.
This happens whether I use our configured traffic manager url (which worked fine for months with single instances) or the native url (.azurewebsites.net). Could this have something to do with the traffic manager? If so, where can I find info on this combination (having searched)? And how do I properly leverage auto-scale with traffic-manager failovers/perf? I have tried putting the traffic manager in both failover and performance mode with no evident effect. I can gladdly provide links via private channels.
UPDATE: We have reproduced the situation now the "other way around": On the account where we were getting the frequent 5XX errors, we have removed all load balanced servers (only one server per app now) and the problem disappeared. And, on the other account, we started to balance across 3 servers (no traffic manager configured) and soon got the frequent 502 and 503 show stoppers.
Related hypothesis here: https://ask.auth0.com/t/health-checks-response-with-500-http-status/446/8
Possibly the cause? Any takers?
UPDATE
After reverting all WebApps to single instances to rule out any relationship to load balancing, things ran fine for a while. Then the same "502" behavior reappeared across all servers for a period of approx. 15 min on 04.Jan.16 , then disappeared again.
UPDATE
Problem reoccurred for a period of 10 min at 12.55 UTC/GMT on 08.Jan.16 and then disappeared again after a few min. Checking logfiles now for more info.
UPDATE
Problem reoccurred for a period of 90 min at roughly 11.00 UTC/GMT on 19.Jan.16 also on .scm. page. This is the "reference-client" Web App on the account with a Web App named "dummy1015". "502 - Web server received an invalid response while acting as a gateway or proxy server."
I don't think Traffic Manager is the issue here. Since Traffic Manager works at the DNS level, it cannot be the source of the 5XX errors you are seeing. To confirm, I suggest the following:
Check if the increased response times are coming from the DNS lookup or from the web request.
Introduce Traffic Manager whilst keeping your single instance / non-load-balanced set up, and confirm that the problem does not re-appear
This will help confirm if the issue relates to Traffic Manager or some other aspect of the load-balancing.
Regards,
Jonathan Tuliani
Program Manager
Azure Networking - DNS and Traffic Manager
I cant seem to find any documentation for it.
If connection draining is not available how is one supposed to do zero-downtime deployments?
Rick Rainey answered essentially the same question on Server Fault. He states:
The recommended way to do this is to have a custom health probe in
your load balanced set. For example, you could have a simple
healthcheck.html page on each of your VM's (in wwwroot for example)
and direct the probe from your load balanced set to this page. As long
as the probe can retrieve that page (HTTP 200), the Azure load
balancer will keep sending user requests to the VM.
When you need to update a VM, then you can simply rename the
healthcheck.html to a different name such as _healthcheck.html. This
will cause the probe to start receiving HTTP 404 errors and will take
that machine out of the load balanced rotation because it is not
getting HTTP 200. Existing connections will continue to be serviced
but the Azure LB will stop sending new requests to the VM.
After your updates on the VM have been completed, rename
_healthcheck.html back to healthcheck.html. The Azure LB probe will start getting HTTP 200 responses and as a result start sending
requests to this VM again.
Repeat this for each VM in the load balanced set.
Note, however, that Kevin Williamson from Microsoft states in his MSDN blog post Heartbeats, Recovery, and the Load Balancer, "Make sure your probe path is not a simple HTML page, but actually includes logic to determine your service health (eg. Try to connect to your SQL database)." So you may actually want an aspx page that can check several factors, including a custom "drain" flag you put somewhere.
Your clients need to simply retry.
The load balancer only forwards a request to an instance that is alive (determined by pings), it doesn't keep track of the connections. So if you have long-standing connections, it is your responsibility to clean them up on restart events or leave it to the OS to clean them up on restarts (which is obviously not gracefully in most of the cases).
Zero-downtime means that you'll always be able to reach an instance that is alive, nothing more- it gives you no guarantees on long running requests.
Note that when a probe is down, only new connections will go to other VMs
Existing connections are not impacted.