504 upstream request timeout

1. The problem I’m having:

We have a Rails application with a page that takes >15 seconds to render. When our users hit this page their browser times out at 15 seconds and responds with a 504 status and a message of “upstream request timeout”.

I tried increasing the “response_header_timeout” to 60s but that didn’t work. The request still times out at 15 seconds with the same status and message.

2. Error messages and/or full log output:

upstream request timeout

3. Caddy version:

v2.7.6 h1:w0NymbG2m9PcvKWsrXO6EEkY9Ru4FJK8uQbYcev1p3A=

4. How I installed and ran Caddy:

Caddy is being used as a reverse proxy and is running in an AWS ECS container.

a. System environment:

AWS ECS container

b. Command:

caddy run --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

c. Service/unit/compose file:

FROM caddy:2.7
COPY ./config/Caddyfile /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
CMD ["caddy", "run", "--config", "/etc/caddy/Caddyfile"]

d. My complete Caddy config:

# Global config options
# https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/options
{
	# turn off admin API endpoint
	admin off

	servers {
		trusted_proxies static private_ranges

		# enabled metics
		# https://caddyserver.com/docs/metrics
		metrics
	}
}

# Internal endpoint for serving healthchecks etc.
:80 {
	respond /up "UP" 200
}


:3000 {
	# Block API calls from the WWW
	@blocked {
		header x-forwarded-proto https
		path /internal_api
	}
	respond @blocked 401

	reverse_proxy cobalt2.{$LH_DATASET}:3000 {
	  # Backend API must respond to an individual API call under 60 seconds
	  transport http {
	      response_header_timeout 60s
	  }
	}

  log {
    output stdout
    format json
  }
}


:3001 {
	# Block API calls from the WWW
	@blocked {
		header x-forwarded-proto https
		path /internal_api
	}
	respond @blocked 401

	reverse_proxy durin.{$LH_DATASET}:3001 {
	  # Backend API must respond to an individual API call under 60 seconds
	  transport http {
	      response_header_timeout 60s
	  }
	}

  log {
    output stdout
    format json
  }
}

5. Caddy log output:

{
   "level": "error",
   "ts": 1715094351.0666327,
   "logger": "http.log.access.log0",
   "msg": "handled request",
   "request": {
      "remote_ip": "10.202.53.160",
      "remote_port": "10956",
      "client_ip": "10.202.40.229",
      "proto": "HTTP/1.1",
      "method": "GET",
      "host": "my.application.example",
      "uri": "/users",
      "headers": {
         "Priority": [
            "u=0, i"
         ],
         "Cookie": [],
         "Sec-Ch-Ua": [
            "\"Chromium\";v=\"124\", \"Google Chrome\";v=\"124\", \"Not-A.Brand\";v=\"99\""
         ],
         "Sec-Ch-Ua-Mobile": [
            "?0"
         ],
         "Upgrade-Insecure-Requests": [
            "1"
         ],
         "Accept-Language": [
            "en-US,en;q=0.9"
         ],
         "Sec-Fetch-User": [
            "?1"
         ],
         "Accept-Encoding": [
            "gzip, deflate, br, zstd"
         ],
         "Sec-Gpc": [
            "1"
         ],
         "X-Forwarded-For": [
            "10.202.40.229"
         ],
         "X-Amzn-Trace-Id": [
            "Root=1-663a4340-1f7b02544e853b6b2891eda9"
         ],
         "User-Agent": [
            "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
         ],
         "Sec-Fetch-Mode": [
            "navigate"
         ],
         "Sec-Fetch-Site": [
            "same-origin"
         ],
         "Sec-Fetch-Dest": [
            "document"
         ],
         "Referer": [
            "https://my.application.example/programs"
         ],
         "X-Forwarded-Proto": [
            "https"
         ],
         "X-Forwarded-Port": [
            "443"
         ],
         "Sec-Ch-Ua-Platform": [
            "\"macOS\""
         ],
         "Accept": [
            "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.7"
         ]
      }
   },
   "bytes_read": 0,
   "user_id": "",
   "duration": 15.001381496,
   "size": 24,
   "status": 504,
   "resp_headers": {
      "Server": [
         "Caddy",
         "envoy"
      ],
      "Content-Length": [
         "24"
      ],
      "Content-Type": [
         "text/plain"
      ],
      "Date": [
         "Tue, 07 May 2024 15:05:51 GMT"
      ],
      "X-Envoy-Upstream-Service-Time": [
         "15000"
      ]
   }
}

Seems like you’re proxying to Envoy before it reaches your app? I think Envoy is timing out the request, not Caddy.

2 Likes

You are completely correct; this is a known AWS ECS / Envoy problem and has nothing to do with Caddy.

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1 Like

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