Best practices for working with endpoints

  • Do not use anonymous endpoints. Always use named endpoints. As anynymous endpoints have auto-generated names in the synapse configuration, it is difficult to identify which endpoint is causing the error in case of an error.

  • Configure timeout settings appropriately. Timeout configurations are required before you go into production with the system.

The diagram below illustrates the typical message flow when a proxy service is involved in a client-server communication. The two connectores, Client to Proxy connection and Proxy to Backend connection are two separate connections that do not depend on each other. Even if one connections times out, the other is unaffected.

Here are the important timeout parameters you should configure before going into production:

Parameter Description Configuration File Default Value Recommended Value
[transport.http] socket_timeout = 180000
The socket timeout of the Passthrough http/https transport sender and listener. You can find the passthru-http.properties file in the <EI_HOME>/conf directory. deployment.toml 180000 180000
Endpoint timeout

The timeout parameter that you should configure at the endpoint level. You can configure timeout values as required for specific endpoints.

Here's a sample endpoint configuration that is configured with timeout parameters. Here, <duration> is the timeout value, and <responseAction> is the action to be taken on timeout. In this example, it is invoking the FaultSequence .

<endpoint>
  <address uri="http://localhost:8281/services/SimpleStockQuoteService">
  <timeout>
  <duration>120000</duration>
  <responseAction>fault</responseAction>
  </timeout>
  </address>
  </endpoint>

Follow the formula Socket Timeout > max(Global endpoint timeout, Timeout of individual endpoints) , and make sure that you set the http.socket.timeout to a value higher than all other endpoint timeout values.

 Endpoint configuration files synapse.global_timeout_interval Depends on the use case, Typically 120000
[mediation] synapse.global_timeout_interval = "120000"

Global timeout value for endpoints. Can be overwritten by individual endpoint timeout values.

Synapse, which is the underlying mediation engine of ESB Micro Integrator, is a complete asynchronous messaging engine that does not block its worker threads on network I/O. Instead, it registers a call-back for a particular request and returns the threads without waiting for a response. When a response is available, the registered call-back is used to correlate it with the relevant request so that further processing can be done.
If the backend server does not respond, it is required to clear the registered call-backs after a particular duration to prevent possible memory leaks. This duration is set via a timer task called TimeoutHandler . The synapse.global_timeout_interval parameter represents the duration that a call-back should be kept in the call-back store.

If you have configured a timeout value at the endpoint level, the global timeout value is not taken into consideration for that endpoint. For all the other endpoints that do not have a timeout value configured, the global value is considered as the timeout value.

You can configure the synapse.global_timeout_interval parameter in the <MI_HOME>/conf/deployment.toml file. The default value is 120 seconds. If you want to support endpoint timeout values that are greater than 120 seconds, set the synapse.global_timeout_interval to a value more than 120 seconds. However, the need to set such large timeout values for endpoints is extremely unlikely.

 deployment.toml 120000 120000
[synapse_properties] synapse.timeout_handler_interval = "15000" Duration between two TimeoutHandler executions.The TimeoutHandler is executed every 15 seconds by default. Therefore, the time that call-backs get cleared can deviate up to 15 seconds from the configured value.
You can configure the TimeoutHandler execution interval by specifying a required value for synapse.timeout_handler_interval in the <MI_HOME>/conf/deployment.toml file.		 deployment.toml 15000 15000

  • Set the socket timeout value and individual endpoint timeout values appropriately. Use this formula to set timeout values:

    Socket Timeout > max(Global endpoint timeout Timeout of individual endpoints)

  • Be sure to set proper values to advanced configuration parameters, although they are optional.
    The happy path should work with the default values, but you might encounter issues in production when the system does not follow the happy path. For example, if you use the default configurations and as an error occurs in your sequence, the endpoint gets suspended immediately and subsequent messages to that endpoint get rejected without being sent to the backend service. This might not be the expected behaviour in every use case. Therefore, it is important to perform endpoint error handling based on the use case.

  • Use the HTTP endpoint for RESTful service invocations. The HTTP endpoint is especially designed to make RESTful service integration easy. For example, it supports url-templates , which is an option to set the http method.

  • For RESTful service integration, use either REST APIs or HTTP endpoints. You can use REST APIs to expose an integration solution as a RESTful service, and use HTTP endpoints to logically represent a RESTful backend service.

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