Timeouts on API Calls

API Issues
#1

Api calls to both company details and company search are timing out intermittently. Additionally this seems to correspond with the companies house website being slow to respond in browser.

I am using nodejs to make the api calls and the exact error message received is “ETIMEDOUT”. This doesn’t appear to be a rate limit issue as no 429 error is occurring, the code is limiting itself and large numbers of consecutive requests are made successfully in between random time out errors. When a time out occurs retries result in further time outs for a seemingly random length of time.

It seems that the server on which the api is running could just be overloaded which, if the companies house website resides on the same machine, would explain why browsers experience the same issues.

This is likely a related issue: Intermittent timeouts

#2

I am currently developing a small application and just making a handful of test requests with curl to explore the data. I found the responses extremely slow both yesterday and today. For example:

time curl -u${MY_KEY} https://api.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/XXXXX
{"company_number":"XXXXX",...}
real	1m16.485s
user	0m0.027s
sys	0m0.022s

Perhaps related to what you’re observing Ivan? I would not expect responses to take this long…

Cheers,
Dave

#3

Hi Dave,

I’ve just run a test, increasing my maximum wait period before timeout from 30 seconds to three minutes and the requests are still timing out.
Interestingly it seems if a request is made successfully that subsequent requests are more likely to be successful, although I’m unsure what, if anything, that indicates.

Also this problem seems to appear and disappear at random, for example yesterday morning and Wednesday I was not experiencing this problem but I have experienced it before then and it seems particularly bad today.

#4

Hi Ivan,

Just getting into the office now and retrying my test query:

time curl -u${MY_KEY} https://api.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/XXXXX
{"company_number":"XXXXX",...}
real	0m0.277s
user	0m0.026s
sys	0m0.012s

Looks like performance is now more what I would expect…

Cheers,
Dave

#5

Interesting, I wonder if this was just down to load on their system last week then…