Stream Error in the HTTP/2 framing layer: bigrquery commands error in R studio but not in Base R

Question

I have several programs written in R that use bigrquery to run queries, table deletes, and upload data. These were all written in R studio with R version 3.3.1 on a windows 7 machine. No issues at all running them over and over.

A new hire is trying to run the same exact programs on Windows 10. Same version of base R and R studio. The packages all install fine and there are no errors of any kind. But commands sent to bigquery through the code (i.e., query_exec, insert_upload_job) will submit, but they hang for several minutes, then return the following error:

Error in curl::curl_fetch_memory(url, handle = handle) : Stream error in the HTTP/2 framing layer

These queries run in 2 seconds normally. These commands run fast in base R on the same machine with no errors.

I have a Windows 10 laptop at home so I installed everything the same way, and it is displaying the same behavior. The commands run fine in base R but "hang" in R studio for several minutes before returning the error above.

What is weird is that periodically the same commands run fine in R studio, but most of the time we get the error.

I looked for this issue and found: r-hub/rhub#32

But I am not able to figure out how to turn off http2 on the client side to see if that would help.

One thing I noticed is that when I check the curl version with: curl::curl_version() It shows version 7.47.1 on my Windows 7 machine (the one that works) and does it does not show an http2 value.

On the Windows 10 machine, it shows curl version 7.53.1, and shows an http2=TRUE parameter.

I haven't been able to figure out how to deprecate the version of curl on the Win10 machine to see if that would fix the issue.

In any case, I would think if it's an issue with the latest version that other folks would be having the same issue.

I also posted this to the bigrquery github issues page but so far no one has responded.

Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

There is no need to downgrade curl to workaround the error in the HTTP2 framing layer. Instead, you could use one of the methods below to set a specific http_version.

Method 1 - httr

For those of you who use the httr package, you can specify the preferred HTTP version directly like this:

# 0 stands for CURL_HTTP_VERSION_NONE (see http_version values below)
httr::set_config(httr::config(http_version = 0))

This workaround was suggested here.

Method 2 - curl or RCurl

Another (lower level) example of how to set the options directly using curl is provided in the package vignettes here. An excerpt:

h <- curl::new_handle()
curl::handle_setopt(h, http_version = 0)
# then use the handle to make a request
# see curl vignettes for an example

For an RCurl example, see TLS v1.1 / TLS v1.2 support in RCurl.

http_version values

The curl HTTP version numbers are available in the C enum defined in the curl header file on GitHub (the link is to an older commit):

enum {
  CURL_HTTP_VERSION_NONE, /* 0, setting this means we don't care, and that we'd
                             like the library to choose the best possible
                             for us! */
  CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_0,  /* 1, please use HTTP 1.0 in the request */
  CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1,  /* 2, please use HTTP 1.1 in the request */
  CURL_HTTP_VERSION_2_0,  /* 3, please use HTTP 2 in the request */
  CURL_HTTP_VERSION_2TLS, /* 4, use version 2 for HTTPS, version 1.1 for HTTP */
  CURL_HTTP_VERSION_2_PRIOR_KNOWLEDGE,  /* 5, please use HTTP 2 without HTTP/1.1
                                           Upgrade */

  CURL_HTTP_VERSION_LAST /* 6, *ILLEGAL* http version */
};