SimpleXML error

Check near the end of this page:
http://www.justindeltener.com/google-mini-appliance-review-and-integrati...

This page also lists the error:
https://uisapp2.iu.edu/confluence-prd/display/SEA/Release+Notes

147312 - Front Ends with KeyMatch or synonym files of 75,000 lines or more may cause the appliance to intermittently return the following error: "Temporary server error. Try again in a minute."

It may or may not be the same cause, as that seems like it would be a HUGE number of keymatches/synonyms!

At any rate, it rather sounds like it's a problem with the GSA, and GoogleMini::resultFactory() ought to test for it so it can process the errors properly.

This looks appropriate:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/simplexml.examples-errors.php

lrobeson: I think you really ought to be looking into software updates for your GSA.

All we can do with simplexml.examples-errors is to hide those error messages away (or rather, pass them to watchdog in a cleaner fashion). It won't make the query work.

Well, we could sleep and re-try the query a few times, I guess.

(I presume that on your live site you have error reporting set to log to the database only, btw?)

No problem. I wasn't sure whether your previous comments meant that customers were seeing the errors, or merely that you were noticing them in the logs, but I thought it might be worth mentioning just in case. And yes, that will stop errors from being displayed to users.

If you wanted to try a work-around, something along the lines of the following might do the trick as a replacement for the $resultXML = curl_exec($ch); line in GoogleMini.php

// Catch any XML errors in the GSA response. Attempt the query up to 3 times before aborting.
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$max_attempts = 3;
while ($max_attempts-- > 0) {
  $retry = FALSE;
  $resultXML = curl_exec($ch);
  if ($payload = simplexml_load_string($resultXML)) {
    break; // Successful
  }
  else {
    foreach (libxml_get_errors() as $error) {
      watchdog('google_appliance', $error->message);
      // Automatically re-try the request if the "Temporary server error." message was returned.
      if (strpos($error->message, "Temporary server error. Try again in a minute." !== FALSE)) {
        $retry = TRUE;
        sleep 1;
      }
    }
  }
  if (!$retry) {
    break;
  }
}
if ($retry) {
  // Provide friendly failure message for users.
  throw new GoogleMiniResultException("Temporary server error. Try again in a minute.");
  watchdog('google_appliance', t("Aborting query after maximum failed attempts."));
}

That's completely untested, and I'm unsure about raising the exception, but with any luck that will do what I intended (which is automatically attempt the query up to three times if that error is being returned, and then provide a user-friendly failure message).

It relies on simplexml_load_string() having no side-effects, as it's now getting called in query() as well as in resultFactory().

Those max_attempts and sleep values should probably be constants, but otherwise this might be potential patch material.