My PHP keeps throwing random errors which relate to slow scripts. nginx/php5-fpm report in their error logs that the child has been terminated due to script timeout.
PHP5-FPM slow error log reports the problem is with the curl requests i make.
Confused because i use connect timeouts on all my curl requests e.g.
CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT 3 #number of seconds trying to connect
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT 3 #number of seconds to run curl for
This is a production server so the values are low, we expect a respond within 1 second.
So i realised that the URL's we use for the CURL must be failing at the DNS level.
So i simulated a bad DNS or an unavailable DNS and i was able to reproduce the same errors and slow script messages in my log.
So, how do i deal with this?
1) CURLOPT_DNS_CACHE_TIMEOUT - but increase the default from 2 minutes to say 10 minutes?
However, i did see that in my errors i had these slow scripts for 2 minutes and 3 seconds exactly... which suggests the CURLOPT_DNS_CACHE_TIMEOUT default of 2 minutes is caching a bad response which is killing it for however long the cache is set for. The timings seemed to convenient to ignore but i could be wrong. Would it cache a bad DNS / unavailable DNS?
2) Edit my DNS nameservers somehow to allow multiple DNS servers.
However i edited my resolv.conf file and added openDNS to the existing nameservers. But i put a fake DNS first 1.1.1.1 and it still failed giving me a bad gateway error on the site. Why isn't it picking another server to get a response?
I thought adding multiple servers would sort it but it is still reading the first in the list and failing. I think the curl cache might be caching bad responses but i'm not sure. Ideally i keep the cache to reduce the latency to lookup the IP.
Any suggestions on how i could solve an unavailable DNS server from crashing my php script / curl requests?
thanks
dig
/nslookup
/etc.). If the application gets a DNS timeout, that means the operating system wasn't able to reach any of those nameservers fast enough to supply the answer.