packagemanager.rstudio.com serves an HTTP 504 error with R-CMD-CHECK.yml on Ubuntu 18.04

Could someone verify that packagemanager.rstudio.com is down? I originally discovered this by running the R-CMD-CHECK.yml from r-lib/actions for a private package, and verified by going to the website in my browser.

Here's the error from the Ubuntu 18.04 (devel) run from the r-lib/actions/setup-r-dependencies block of the yaml file:

Install dependencies
  ℹ Loading metadata database
  ✔ Loading metadata database ... done
  
  
  Error: Error: <callr_remote_error: lexical error: invalid char in json text.
                                         <html>  <head><title>504 Gatewa
                       (right here) ------^
  >
   in process 9045 
  -->
  <simpleError: lexical error: invalid char in json text.
                                         <html>  <head><title>504 Gatewa
                       (right here) ------^
  >
  
   Stack trace:
  
   12. (function (...)  ...
   13. base:::withCallingHandlers(cli_message = function(msg) { ...
   14. asNamespace("pak")$system_requirements_internal(...)
   15. jsonlite::fromJSON(rawToChar(res$content), simplifyVector = FALSE)
   16. jsonlite:::parse_and_simplify(txt = txt, simplifyVector = simplifyVector,  ...
   17. jsonlite:::parseJSON(txt, bigint_as_char)
   18. jsonlite:::parse_string(txt, bigint_as_char)
   19. base:::.handleSimpleError(function (e)  ...
   20. h(simpleError(msg, call))
   21. base:::stop(e)
   22. (function (e)  ...
  
   x lexical error: invalid char in json text.
                                         <html>  <head><title>504 Gatewa
                       (right here) ------^
   
  
  Execution halted
  Error: Process completed with exit code 1.

Is there a better place to discuss this? I'm only concerned because status.rstudio.com still says that the service is operational.

3 Likes

Yes, it is definitely down. I'll try to find out more.

3 Likes

We've hit the same problems this morning. Scheduled workflows did not work this morning that worked fine yesterday evening.

And I was equally confused that the https://status.rstudio.com/ shows it as operational.

Thanks for verifying that it is down @Gabor !

1 Like

Hi all, I'm sorry for any issues you all had to deal with here. I do see PPM (public package manager) recovering here and will continue to monitor. I'm the director of engineering for RSPM, and I have a lot I can share here so that you understand more what's going on (and what we're doing to make it better).

We do get internal alerts on the RSPM team when things slow down or become non-functional on PPM, and we noticed roughly 3 months ago that this started increasing in severity. These tend to be really small blips, and so what just happened was an anomaly (and is why we missed updating the status page). But these blips were concerning, and we had some internal performance metrics as well to show that RSPM needed some improvements in the area. So we've spent a good amount of the last few months improving the caching behavior of RSPM, so that our professional customers and PPM can benefit from this. These changes are slated to be released in the next few weeks, and I believe this will clear up the kind of issue you were seeing today.

Separate from the above, we've also recognized that the infrastructure we use to run PPM is not good enough for the long term. So we have a longer-term project that kicked off about a month ago to rebuild that infrastructure. These changes will allow PPM to scale much more easily to handle large fluctuations in use as well as increased usage. These changes will take awhile- while we have done the planning and are started to make them, I would not expect these to be set until the first half of next year.

So the short version of the above is that we are aware that there are some issues on PPM that we are addressing, with some of those changes coming in the next few weeks. I'll also make sure we discuss internally the status page and if there's anything else we should be doing than the above. I love that so many people use PPM, and my apologies again that it's been having some issues lately. I'm excited to get things fixed up so that it can continue to grow and be used more by the community.

7 Likes

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