[PUBLIC API] HTTP 5xx errors

[irfan-dahir]

Do your error responses resemble this?

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This has become a very reoccurring issue since the past few months so I'll pin it for once and leave an official statement about it here.

The issue

This is an issue caused by a MAL bad response. It's when MAL takes way too long to respond and/or returns a blank response. This could be due to overwhelming traffic by our IP connections.

The Jikan HTTP client thus returns errors like

• Status code must be an integer value between 1xx and 5xx.
• The HTTP status code "0" is not valid.

This issue is affecting both API versions v3 and v4. However, less on v4 as it's querying most results from a database instead.

What I'm doing to resolve it

1. Cache v3 responses for a long period of time
2. Discontinuing v3 in favor of v4 - I'll be announcing a timeline in February
3. Created v4 which favors a database querying strategy for many API calls unlike v3 which uses an in-memory set/get caching strategy

What you should do to help resolve it

1. If you are on v3, I suggest switching on v4 where these errors are less frequent and will become minimal once v3's discontinued.

2. Cache client-side if you aren't already

3. The success rate of the request is very high if you re-request it right after it fails.

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Hope that helps!

[irfan-dahir]

In V4 the error will look like this

Message: Undefined array key "url"
Trace: /var/www/jikan-rest/vendor/symfony/http-client/Response/TransportResponseTrait.php on line 129

This is because v4 uses a different HTTP client than v3.