Why does my Github webhook keep timing out?

Question

We couldn’t deliver this payload: Service Timeout

I was successfully sending webooks to my server 5 minutes ago, and now I just keep getting timeouts. I tried deleting the webook and re-adding it, changing the URL it points to, but nothing.

Am I flooding it with too many pushes, or is GitHub's webhook service just down?

Answer 1

Unless there is some kind of error on the GitHub side (which doesn't seem to be the case at the moment, given their "System Status" history), you might check the program receiving the payload of that webhook.

See a similar problem in Supybot-plugins 225:

I contacted GitHub support and one of the employees has been troubleshooting this for me. Here is part of what he had to say about the issue:

I just tried making a request manually from one of our machines, and that went through with no error (see curl -v output below).
However, I did notice that it took extremely long for the request to be processed -- over 15 seconds (for 2 bytes of data).

Decoupling the listening and reception of the payload, from its proicessing, is generally the right approach, as I recommended ion "Perl Script slow over Tomcat 6.0 and generates service time out".
The first part should be as fast as possible.

Answer 2

It also turns out that GitHub has a 10-second timeout set on their webhooks. That is what I ran into. See the documentation here.