CODEWITHSUNDEEP
dialogflow-esactions-on-google
Claor Uninter
Claor Uninter

Reputation: 141

Slow time response on DialogFlow fullfilment http requests

I am developing an app for google assistant on DialogFlow. On certain intent I have a fullfilment which has to do a http request.

The code is like this:

const syncrequest = require('sync-request');

console.log('Request start');

var res = syncrequest('GET', urlRequest, {
  json: {},
});

console.log('Request end');

Testing the url that I'm using it takes approximately 0.103 seconds to respond. But looking at the firebase log, it is like this:

3:01:58.555 PM dialogflowFirebaseFulfillment Request end

3:01:56.585 PM dialogflowFirebaseFulfillment Request start

Even thought my server respond in 0.103 seconds, the request takes 2 seconds to be processed. Sometimes it takes more than 4 seconds and makes my app crash. Does anyone have any idea why is it taking so long? Is there something that I can do to do the request faster?

Thanks in advance

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1862

Answers (1)

Prisoner
Prisoner

Reputation: 50701

I haven't looked too hard at the sync-request package, but I do see this big warning on the npm page for it:

You should not be using this in a production application. In a node.js application you will find that you are completely unable to scale your server. In a client application you will find that sync-request causes the app to hang/freeze. Synchronous web requests are the number one cause of browser crashes. For production apps, you should use then-request, which is exactly the same except that it is asynchronous.

Based on this, and some other information on the page, it sounds like this package is very poor on performance, and may handle the synchronous operations grossly inefficiently.

You may wish to switch to the then-request package, as it suggests, however the most common way to handle HTTP calls is using request-promise-native, where you'd do something like:

const rp = require('request-promise-native');

return rp.get(url)
  .then( body => {
    // Set the Dialogflow response here
    // You didn't really show this in your code.
  });

If you are doing asynchronous tasks - you must return a promise from your intent handler.

Upvotes: 2

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