Hi guys,
This week I've been getting a lot of reports from the users of my third party app that say they are suddenly unable to use the Comic Vine API to search for a couple of specific volumes. So I investigated, and I found that when you use the Search API to search for those two volumes, the http request will always time out and you'll get either a 500 or a 502 (bad gateway) error.
This is a new behaviour. It might indicate that some kind of infinite loop or something similar was recently introduced on the server side of Comic Vine's public API. What follows is a specific description of the problem. Note: you will have to substitute your own API key into the URL's I've provided.
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Say I'm searching for "Superman" volumes. The API query might look like:
https://comicvine.gamespot.com/api/search/?api_key=[YOUR-API-KEY]&format=xml&limit=20&query=superman&resources=volume
But as of this moment, that query always times out. If you change the search term to something else that will return a lot of volumes ('spiderman' or 'batman') it still works fine and returns results quickly.
What about if I'm searching for "Cyborg"? As of this writing, there's only 26 volumes that should be returned by this http request:
https://comicvine.gamespot.com/api/search/?api_key=[YOUR-API-KEY]&format=xml&limit=100&query=cyborg&resources=volume
But this request times out too! Note that limit=100 and query=cyborg.
If I switch to limit results to 20 volumes instead, it works fine:
https://comicvine.gamespot.com/api/search/?api_key=[YOUR-API-KEY]&format=xml&limit=20&query=cyborg&resources=volume
In fact, if I try anything less than 20 issues, it also works fine. But 21 issues or more, and it always times out. Also, for the first query I mentioned (superman), it times out no matter what I set the limit to.
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Hopefully this is enough info to help you guys track down the bug. It is probably related to changes that were made in the last week or so, since my app has a lot of users and they all started noticing problems on Wednesday. The problems have all been related to the same queries I've described above ('cyborg' and 'superman', limit=100).
If I can help verify a fix or provide more information, just let me know.
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