I have a Node server running on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. One of my endpoints accepts a huge payload and the function itself is pretty slow and lengthy, and can take upwards of 10+ minutes.
Due to business requirements it must remain as a single HTTP POST and cannot be split up to be any smaller.
On larger calls I am getting a 504 GATEWAY TIMEOUT, always around the 60 second mark. I have tried toying with the timeout settings in Elastic Beanstalk Load Balancer section to no avail, it seems the longest timeout duration is 60 second anyway.
I did see one promising solution in the docs at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/classic/config-idle-timeout.html
To ensure that lengthy operations such as file uploads have time to complete, send at least 1 byte of data before each idle timeout period elapses
This sounds like exactly what I need, but I do not know how to accomplish
1) How can I "send at least 1 byte of data" from my Node app to ensure the session is kept alive and doesn't timeout after one minutes
504 Timeouts on ElasticBeanstalk environments can be resolved by settings your ELB policies. Updating Nginx timeout configurations may also be required.
ELB policies: Set the Idle Timeout of your Elastic Load Balancer to the value of your choice (defaults to 60s). To do this, create a .ebextensions folder in the root of your project. In this folder create another file with a .config file extension, and set the ELB Idle Timeout to the value of your choice (e.g. 300 seconds):
option_settings:
- namespace: aws:elb:policies
option_name: ConnectionSettingIdleTimeout
value: 300
Or if you are using an application load balancer:
option_settings:
- namespace: aws:elbv2:loadbalancer
option_name: IdleTimeout
value: 300
Nginx configuration: Set Nginx the with the desired value of timeout: send_timeout, proxy_connect_timeout, proxy_read_timeout, proxy_Send_timeout all default to 60s (additional specification to check may be: client_header_timeout, client_body_timeout, keepalive_timeout). Default timeout values in Nginx are specified in the specifications and configurations files (e.g. the .config files under /etc/nginx). In the .ebextensions folder create a new file (e.g. 01-nginx-configuration.config or update in the .config file above), and append the following content inside the file (add or remove relevant settings according to the timeouts observed):
files:
"/etc/nginx/conf.d/nginx.custom.conf":
mode: "644"
owner: "root"
group: "root"
content: |
client_header_timeout 300;
client_body_timeout 300;
send_timeout 300;
proxy_connect_timeout 300;
proxy_read_timeout 300;
proxy_send_timeout 300;
container_commands:
01_restart_nginx:
command: "sudo service nginx reload"
There are several more ways to add this configuration. Read more here and here.
Edit (06/11/2020):
Some people indicated that the keep_alive 300; configuration crushed their server. Therefore, I've removed that from the nginx.custom.conf configuration.
In order to update the nginx config on the Amazon Linux 2 platform I successfully managed to increase the timeout limits by extending the nginx config following these instructions: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/platforms-linux-extend.html
/.platform/nginx/conf.d/myconf.conf:
client_header_timeout 300;
client_body_timeout 300;
send_timeout 300;
proxy_connect_timeout 300;
proxy_read_timeout 300;
proxy_send_timeout 300;