Quickblox chat channel stopped working after 2 days - quickblox

I have a quickblox account that we're using internally for testing. Very low throughput (Total of around 600 messages across 2 days and never more than a 3 or 4 per second at the very peak.)
Today the messages stopped sending in the chatroom. There doesn't appear to be any errors coming through the network panel of chrome and no errors popping up in the admin panel.
As a test, without changing any client code, I created a new room and simply updated my config so my client pointed there. This worked with absolutely no problems.
Are there any things I may be missing here? Is this possibly a free tier thing where only a few hundred messages may be sent at any one time or is this more likely something client side?

It were some maintenance periods, you should receive emails about it.
So maybe you were trying to use chat during that period.
600 messages across 2 days it's very small value, so no problems here with limits.

Related

Understanding why you would want to process Message Queues at a future time

So I'm trying to understand what practical problems Queues solve. By reading all the information from Google, I get the high-level.
Push message to Queue for processing at a later time
So I'm looking at an architecture from Company A and they have different use cases for Job Queueing like for example
chat messages
file conversion
searching
Heavy sql queries
Why process it at a later time?
Here's my best guess...
Let's say I have an application that can process 10 "things" at a time.
My application then maxes out it's processing capacity.
an 11th request came in so app puts it in the Queue for later processing
Assuming this is a valid Use Case, wouldn't adding more servers to process more "things" make sense? Is it because it's more costly to add more servers than employ a Queue and sacrifice response time a little bit?
Given my Use Case examples, what other problems would Queues solve for them?
Have you ever lined up at a bank when it is busy? You would have waited in a queue.
"But," you could say, "wouldn't adding more staff to process more customers make sense? Is it because it's more costly to add more staff than employ a Queue and sacrifice response time a little bit?"
That would be correct. It can be quite costly to staff a bank based on the peak number of customers who would arrive each day. It is cheaper to staff below this level and have some customers wait in a queue.
Also, the number of customers each day are not 100% predictable. A queue allows excess demand to wait without breaking the system.
Queues enable decoupling.
For example, imagine an online store where customers purchase an item. They select the item, provide a credit card number and click 'Purchase'. If the credit card is declined, the online store can immediately prompt them to re-enter the number. This interaction has to take place immediately while the customer is still online.
However, there is no need to have the customer wait while an invoice is generated, a record is added to the accounting system and inventory is pulled off the shelf. This can be decoupled from the ordering process. A good way to do it is to push the order into a queue, which can be handled by the next system.
If that 'next system' happens to be offline at the moment, there is no reason to cancel the whole sale. The transaction can be processed when the 'next system' comes back online. This is much better than failing the whole process just because one component (which is not required immediately) has a failure.
Bottom line: Queues are excellent. They enable better handling of failures. They makes things more resilient (just wait a few minutes and try again!). They should be used at all times when the process is compatible with a queuing architecture.
Let's do scenarios
Scenario 1 without queue:
you request an endpoint /blabla/do-eveything/
this request do
download an image from very slow FTP
e.g 1.5 sec (can error, retry ? add +X sec)
attach the image to an email
send an email (3 sec)
e.g 1 sec (can error, retry ? add +X sec)
confirmation received > store confirmation to a third company tracking stuff
e.g 1.5 (can error, retry ? add +X sec)
when tracking confirm, update your data from another third company for big data purpose
e.g 2 sec (can error, retry ? add +X sec)
... you get the idead
return the response e.g 11 sec later (this is to slow) or more or timeout when everything failed
End user said internet was faster 20 years ago, maybe I need to change my internet connection or change my 16 threads
Scenario 2 queue everything you can:
you request an endpoint /blabla/do-eveything/
this request do
Queue job "DO_EVERYTHING"
e.g 0.02 sec
Return the response less then 0.250 sec
End user said that is website/app is too fast, I can keep my 56K internet connection
on queue/event system one failed job can be retry later without affeting the end user
you can pause job, add a unlimited number a task/step after the original message
better fault tolerance
Working with queue will allow you a better micro/nano service architecture, better testing because, you can test a single job, intead of a full controller that do everything...
Ye, is maybe more work, more thinking, but a the end no need to think about the work when holidays

no result response from FCM push notification

We launched a new mobile app for iOS and Android devices first week of January and use FCM to send push notification to users.
Thus far we've sent (based on the firebase console report) ~60k notifications out to our users and overall its a very solid and reliable platform. We split our 'sends' in groups of 1000 push tokens / devices.
Question: ~15 times since we've launched we've received 'No Result' back from the CURL that sends the notifications upstream to FCM... and on one occasion we received an error 500.
To work around this and not just assume success we are detecting when the result isn't what we expect it to be upon success, and we log the response (i.e. "no result")... then wait 5 seconds and retry, up to 3 times. (our log message denotes the 'try number' as well).
We have, maybe twice a week, received the 'first try' message (meaning the first attempt failed and 5 secs later the 2nd attempt kicks off)... and only ONCE (this week) have we received the 'second try' message...
We're wondering if this is normal behavior for FCM? Is there some paid level of support or access that would alleviate these re-try instances for us? I don't think there is an SLA for FCM, but generally speaking are others seeing this same behavior and is the rate I've described here what you'd' consider 'normal'?
Thx!
Answer received from Google today:
Hello!
If I've correctly understood this, you have sent 60k messages and received 16 failures? That comes out to around 99.9997% success. Three nines is pretty much industry gold. So looking stellar so far.
There is no paid FCM version, but all clients, regardless of payment plan, run on the best hardware available so you're already in the premium servers. : )

Azure IoT Hub blocked for two consecutive days, will not let me change to a paid tier

I have a free tier subscription to Azure IoT hub with only two edge devices connected to it, one of them mostly off. Yesterday, it looks like my hub recorded a slew of messages--within 45 minutes (5 to 5:45 pm PST), 25K messages were recorded by the hub. A few related issues.
I'm not sure what these messages were. I'll add message storage for the future, but wondering if there's a way to debug this.
Ever since then, I haven't been able to use the IoT hub. I get a "message count exceeded" error. That made sense till around 5 pm PST today (same day UTC), but not sure why it is still blockign me after that.
I tried to change my F1 to a basic tier to basic, but that wasn't allowed because I am apparently "not allowed to downgrade"
Any help with any of these?
1.I'm not sure what these messages were. I'll add message storage for the future, but wondering if there's a way to debug this.
IoT Hub operations monitoring enables you to monitor the status of operations on your IoT hub in real time. You can use it to monitor Device identity operations,Device telemetry,Cloud-to-device messages,Connections,File uploads and Message routing.
2.Ever since then, I haven't been able to use the IoT hub. I get a "message count exceeded" error. That made sense till around 5 pm PST
today (same day UTC), but not sure why it is still blockign me after
that.
IoT Hub Free edition enables you to transmit up to a total of 8,000 messages per day, and register up to 500 device identities. The device identity limit is only present for the Free Edition.
3.I tried to change my F1 to a basic tier to basic, but that wasn't allowed because I am apparently "not allowed to downgrade".
You cannot switch from Free to one of the paid editions. The free edition is meant to test out proof-of-concept solutions only.
Confirming the earlier answer, the only solution is to delete the old hub and create a new free one, which is simple enough.
I still haven't figured out what those specific error messages were, but I do notice that when there are errors such as CA certificate auth failures, lots of messages get sent up. I'm still working with MSFT support on the CA certificate signing issues, but this one is a side effect.
For future reference, look at yoru hub's metrics, and note that (i) quote gets reset midnight UTC, but (ii) net violations do not.

When are issue velocity alerts sent

I have configured Fabric and Crashlytics in my application. I have added the call to test crashes:
Crashlytics.sharedInstance().crash()
I am seeing those crashes reported in the Dashboard with the stack traces and everything.
In the Settings menu under Notifications, I have all the alerts set to On, including Issue Velocity Alert.
According to this answer the Issue Velocity Alert:
If an issue is causing a crash in 1% of all user sessions within the past hour, you'll be notifiied.
I have received a New Fatal Issue Alert for the calls to crash() which shows the I am receiving alerts correctly.
But I haven't received any Issue Velocity Alert. Since 100% of my sessions have crashed to the same error, I should be receiving it right? The first crash happened 3 hours ago.
Note that I have tested it with 1 user on 1 device.
Why am I not receiving any alerts?
Paul from Fabric here. Crashlytics has a minimum threshold of unique users of an app before Velocity Alerts will be sent. I can't say what the exact numbers are, but they're designed to prevent apps with few users from getting spammed by our issue reporting.
This is what I found out looking into it:
An issue in an app exceeds the defined threshold for that app.
The app has 250 sessions in that time period.
There was no alert previously raised for the issue in the app.
Source: https://firebase.google.com/docs/crashlytics/velocity-alerts
Personally, I find the name velocity alert quite misleading.

Long polling Windows Phone, 60 seconds TimeOut

HelloA Windows Phone application need to connect to a server and get messages from it. This is done using WCF and long polling on the server. 3 minutes is the timeout defined on the server. Call from windows phone is done using HttpWebRequest.
The problem is that Windows Phone devices have a timeout of 60 seconds for get request (emulator have a different value, greater than 3 minutes).
Currently i can't decrease server timeout. Doing a new GetRequest after the 60 seconds doesn't get anymore messages.
Does anyone have an idea ?
Thanks
I don't think leaving a connection open is a good idea on mobile devices. I'm assuming that's what you're doing. In my app, I would just poll whenever needed by creating a new HttpWebRequest. But it made sense to do this in my app, because I would be updating train arrival status every 40 seconds.
If you're trying to pull data on a given schedule, put a timer in and just call the webserver every 3 minutes or whatever the requirement is.
If you want to be able to check things (when the app is closed) or if there's rarely fresh data on the server, then you'd need to implement a Push mechanism.
Update: Here's a good article on dealing with the timeout issue - http://blog.xyzzer.me/2011/03/10/real-time-client-server-communication-on-windows-phone-with-long-polling/
Update 2: What if you arranged it so that, you have cascading connections - what I mean is since you can't go beyond 60 seconds per connection, you can write a class that'll house two connections and once one of them is about to timeout, say several seconds before, you can start opening the other connection - you can pick the timing so that there's at most 5 seconds of overlap between them. This way you could have your always open connection.
Also see what these guys have done with the GChat app, they have their source code available at this link. This may provide a more proper design.