Google pubsub 88% of requests come back as 503

Question

Question on why pubsub requests seem to trigger such a high number of 503 errors? Is this something common? It seems other people see something similar but a majority of my requests end up that way

Similar to

Google Pubsub: UNAVAILABLE: The service was unable to fulfill your request

Catch error code from GCP pub/sub

Answer 1

This is expected behavior. Streaming pull, which is used by the client libraries, creates a bidirectional stream for receiving messages and sending back acknowledgements. These streams stay open for long periods of time and don't close with a successful response code when messages are received, they terminate with an error condition when the stream disconnects, perhaps due to a restart on the part of the server receiving the request or because of brief network blip. Therefore, even if you are receiving messages successfully, you'll still see error response codes for all of the streams themselves. The new streaming pull docs address this question directly.