EmphasizedInsanity at /life

Since i had to handle so much crap with Facebook, Rails and the Facebooker plugin in order to get my latest application up, i decided to share a little bit with other innocent coders straying in the path of hell.

The Facebooker plugin interfaces with the Facebook API using the Net::HTTP ruby library and POSTs API requests (API call, FQL..) using the #post method (eventually, there’s a whole bunch of stuff happening before that).
It sounds nice, it really does, problem is that in this specific app we have send a whole bunch of such requests to facebook, some requests return 1000-17,000+ strings back as JSON…. what makes Facebook simply.. stale.

Now getting like 3,400 Timeout exceptions raised in your production servers (adding that the CPU is on 3.2%, RAM is at 10%) is annoying. really annoying.

The “patch” we found for this issue was to ensure a specific amount of retries to be made by rescuing the Timeout Exception.

def get_my_somefing_from_fb

    retry_count = 0

    begin

        do facebook crap

    rescue TimeoutError

        if (retry_count < 5)

           retry_count+=1

        end

    end

end

Now we are watching it closely to see exactly how it helps us, if at all.