505 Gateway Timeout on "Find" Page

I just decided to use the "Find" function to look up a team. It was slow to load, and then finally displayed only the below:



Then I clicked the Find button again, and this time it correctly displayed:

At first blush it looks like an issue of slow server hardware not able to deliver the page up in time. Then on a 2nd try, the contents were probably cached and easily delivered quickly.

The 504 Gateway timeout error may cause some users to think they are just having an internet connection issue on their end. But that's not true. This message is not generated by the user's computer or their network equipment. The message is delivered by the StackSports infrastructure. Most commonly a 504 Gateway timeout message would be delivered by a:

  • a reverse-proxy (load-balancer that sits in front of a server farm, or external security/optimization reverse-proxy service)
  • the web server itself
Reverse-proxies are very commonly used in the following ways:
  • Load-balancers sitting directly in front of a pool of servers. The load balancers evenly distribute the inbound requests between the servers in the pool, and automatically remove any problematic servers from the pool.
  • DDoS protection systems (Akamai, CloudFlare, etc.) let all the web requests come to them first. They absorb the massive load, and only forward through to the company's web servers the legitimate requests.
  • Performance-optimizing CDNs like CloudFlare & Akamai. They're geographically distributed across the globe and use technology like BGP & anycast IPs to allow users' connections to be handled from a very fast geographically close server. These generally cache the static content (CSS files, images, videos, etc.), and then with every connection request, they fetch from the businesses' actual server the dynamic content that changes with each page (such as database requests).

Whether the 504 Gateway timeout was generated by a load-balancer/reverse proxy, or the webserver itself, the bottom line is that the StackSports system didn't respond in time.

If the message was generated by StackSports' own web server, it means that its web engine (probably Nginx) had a timeout waiting for a SQL query or other underlying (php/python/ruby/etc.) code to finish executing. This could be because of slow server hardware that can't keep up with the load, poorly written SQL queries or application code that is highly inefficient, or a number of other server issues.

If the message was generated by a reverse-proxy, it could be caused by the same reasons listed above, or it could also be a number of factors such as network infrastructure performance and connectivity issues between the reverse-proxy and the StackSports servers.

In any case, the bottom line is that this is a StackSports problem. You don't see this kind of message regularly occur when shopping on Amazon, searching Google, or browsing CNN, Fox News or NBA or NFL websites.

You don't have to be a billion-dollar company to run a world-class web-based software platform. Although I've been told StackSports is in fact owned by a billionaire. :-)

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