Amazon API gateway timeout

Question

I have some issue with API gateway. I made a few API methods, sometimes they work longer than 10 seconds and Amazon returns 504 error. Here is screenshot below:

Please help! How can I increase timeout?

Thanks!

Solution 1

Right now the default limit for Lambda invocation or HTTP integration is 30s according to http://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/limits.html and this limit is not configurable.

Solution 2

As of Dec/2017, the maximum value is still 29 seconds, but should be able to customize the timeout value.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/customize-integration-timeouts-in-amazon-api-gateway/

This can be set in "Integration Request" of each method in APIGateway.

Solution 3

You can't increase the timeout, at least not now. Your endpoints must complete in 10 seconds or less. You need to work on improving the speed of your endpoints.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/limits.html

Solution 4

Lambda functions will timeout after a max. of 5 min; API Gateway requests will timeout after 29 sec. You can't change that, but you can workaround it with asynchronous execution pattern, I wrote I blog post about:

https://joarleymoraes.com/serverless-long-running-http-requests/

Solution 5

I wanted to comment on "joarleymoraes" post but don't have enough reputation. The only thing to add to that is that you don't HAVE to refactor to use async, it just depends on your backend and how you can split it up + your client side retries.

If you aren't seeing a high percentage of 504's and you aren't ready for async processing, you can implement client side retries with exponential backoff on them so they aren't permanent failures.

The AWS SDK automatically implements retries with backoff, so it can help to make it easier, especially since Lambda Layers will allow you to maintain the SDK for your functions without having to constantly update your deployment packages.

Once you do that it will result in less visibility into those timeouts, since they are no longer permanent failures. This can buy you some time to deal with the core problem, which is that you are seeing 504's in the first place. That certainly can mean refactoring your code to be more response, splitting up large functions into more "micro service" type concepts and reducing external network calls.

The other benefit to retries is that if you retry all 5xx responses from an application, it can cover a lot of different issues which you might see during normal execution. It is generally considered in all applications that these issues are never 100% avoidable so it's best practice to go ahead and plan for the worst!

All of that being said, you should still work on reducing the lambda execution time or going async. This will allow you to set your timeout values to a much smaller number, which allows you to fail faster. This helps a lot for reducing the impact on the front end, since it doesn't have to wait 29 seconds to retry a failed request.

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