The 411 on the 502

Monday, January 26, 2009 | 7:40 AM

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As many of you know, since becoming a part of Google in June of 2007, the FeedBurner team has been hard at work transforming FeedBurner into a service that uses the same underlying architecture as many other Google applications, running in the same high-volume datacenters. As a team, we chose this path for one reason: our highest priority is making sure your feed is served as fast as possible after you update your content, and is as close as technically possible to being available 100% of the time.

As many of you also know, a month ago we opened up ability for all AdSense publishers to move to this new platform, and just a few days ago made this move available to all FeedBurner publishers. What many of you do not know is that we have been carefully moving publishers for about six months now, looking hard at traffic patterns, debugging issues with these account transfers with publishers and their hosting and service providers, and working with many of our partners (including many other teams at Google) who run feed aggregation platforms to ensure feeds from this new platform are polled and distributed as fast and reliably as possible. (One example: we moved over 100 external Google blogs and their respective FeedBurner feeds over to the new platform as soon as we could; charity (and bug-fixing) begins at home!)

We are very aware of our responsibility to the RSS ecosystem. We are aware we host and provide service to not only some of the largest publishers, but also the feed for your site, the feeds that you rely on for mission-critical news and information, and even some feeds government provides to distribute information on a timely basis to their citizens. We know that many of you run businesses that critically depend on your feed being delivered quickly and reliably, and thus have been working with many of you to ensure that these feeds are delivered in tandem with a monetization solution that allows you to continue business as we go through this transition. FeedBurner has the privilege of serving millions of feeds globally that represent an incredibly wide spectrum of content.

It is this scale however, that makes our transition to Google's platform technically complex, and as we have started to open up account transfers to all users, it has also amplified the permutations of publisher web server configs, service providers, feed readers, search engines, and so on, and so on. We want to ensure that the time we spend tackling this technical complexity is not mistaken for lack of urgency, concern, or priority.

Just as an example, we are aware and have been working on a known issue of returning a "502 Error" or "503 Error" when checking for updates after certain feeds are migrated. This is a very general error message, representing a number of underlying issues, but in many cases it is a service provider throttling or disallowing traffic from Google. Although we came across many of these issues during our testing phase, in reality we knew a lot of these challenges would not fully surface until we released at scale, which we now have and are dealing with as high priority issues within Google.

To help communicate these issues and resolutions much more effectively, we have created a new blog and feed that you can subscribe to during this transition period. We plan to keep these around as long as necessary. We may also add features to the site that allow you to report your own feed issue details.

The extended team — including both original team members of FeedBurner, newer team members that joined us since we've been at Google, and the rest of Google — is excited about our future on this new integrated-with-Google platform that all publishers will be on at the conclusion of this account transfer process. We are excited because we see the potential for scale and innovation on this platform that will make for a true next generation feed management solution. Most of all, however, we are excited about getting publishers excited for these possibilities as we reveal what we have in store.

26 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the updates. It's nice to know what's taking place on the backend as we wait for the errors that have surfaced to be fixed.
Danelle Ice (Homemaker Barbi)

Unknown said...

Are there any known issues around new Feedburner accounts created with Google username/pw not being accessible? I created a new account and started migrating Friday only to be denied login today.

Lydia (The Perfect Pantry) said...

I have certainly noticed that my feed (www.theperfectpantry.com) is not being published as quickly or faithfully since moving over to Google. Nice to know you are aware of problems. Now if only we had a way to communicate directly with Google about these issues....

Norm said...

This is great information, thanks. One question however: If we're plagued with the 502, what's our best course of action? At this point, our site has no opportunities at subscribers, and no subs can read new feeds.

Many thanks in advance.

-Norm (Meet In the Lobby)

Unknown said...

Hi guys
Why there is a 302 redirect from the old url to the new instead of a 301 moved permanently?

Anonymous said...

Uhm... but the Google Feedburner is less flexible than the older one. For example you cannot to have a different account for AdSense like in any other Google service like -for example- Blogger or so on...

mudmaven said...

I'm getting this info in place of the info I should be getting from:
Life's Simple Pleasures (http://malieta-lifessimplepleasures.blogspot.com) a rubber stamping and paper crafting blog. What's going on and where did my feed go?

Unknown said...

@AlbertoL - once all traffic is mirgrated, feeds.feedburner.com will be mapped directly to your feed again without the redirect, so this is temporary

Unknown said...

@Steve

Thanks a lot! :)

Alb

Matt Jabs said...

Thanks for this update. Next time please make sure to update publishers BEFORE you make the change...not after.

I appreciate the fact that you created the new "Feedburner Status Blog" just for this purpose.

Although it was not cool to perform the maintenance without letting pubs know...it is cool that you have quickly rectified the situation and have a good solution from here forward.

I wrote an article on it here.

Thanks again,



Matt of eJabs

Anonymous said...

Maybe this isn't the right place to display it and maybe you can't because it's proprietary but I would love to to hear more technical details about the migration.

I know you were using struts and tomcat and it would be fun to hear how you found moving to Google's platform. Were you still just building a webapp? Did you need to start using Guice and what did you think of it? Are you still using MySQL? Hibernate? Using BigTable now?

Kourosh said...

Hi
What about 999 error. with Yahoo Pipes?

Unknown said...

I get following error message when moving feed:

The following feed URIs are already in use

What i need to do?

Anonymous said...

I have a different google account for adsense. my feeds at feedburner.google.com has different google account. How do I add adsense to my feeds now. please help.

Unknown said...

So I went to feedburner and was prompted to move it to my google account, and I was logged into my gmail account, but the problem is, my adsense account is under a different login. So now I can't put adsense on my feeds. I tried reburning the feeds on the new account, but there's no way to copy my email subscription lists. I guess I can't do adsense on my feeds!

Unknown said...

@Dawn Black - use "Transfer Feed" if you would like to move it to a different account. This is on the single feed edit screen at the top next to edit and delete.

Unknown said...

I am happy to read about back ground work. Thanks to Google feeds for working hard to do better service for small publishers like me.

Unknown said...

I love FeedBurner, and I don't want to seem critical of a free service, however, I'm not sure PingShot is working on my account, and I'm not sure where to contact the FeedBurner staff, nor where to possibly file a bug report.

I tried searching on the various sites that PingShot is supposed to be reporting to, and I can't find any my blog posts on any of those sites.

Yet PingShot is active and configured. Where is the proper place to report it?

fatomei said...

I would like to see Adsense for Content Link Units-type ads in Adsense for Feeds.

Link Units are by far the best revenue generators.

Anonymous said...

I have had no luck using adsense, I have not made a dime!

I have got no tech support from anyone, that does not want you to pay to show you how to use it.

I signed up with triond and my troubles are over, I am now seeing my money nothing much at all its peanuts, blogging is for people who want to dream all there life.

If you can make me change my mind show me how this works because I have gotten no support from anyone about this.


here visit my blog where I know someone will pay me!


http://www.computersight.com/Operating-Systems/Windows/Where-is-Windows-Trouble-Shooter-1.506633

barkook said...

Thank you for the updates. It's nice to know what's taking place on the backend as we wait for the errors that have surfaced to be fixed.

Daniel said...

Hi,

I upgraded my podcast feed a couple of weeks ago. It trashed my statistics prior to the upgrade so it lost the names of the podcast episodes. So I now have a big list of episodes and numbers telling me how many are downloaded but no episode titles to allow me to understand them.

Since then, new downloads have happened and they are being logged correctly per episode title - but the old figures are still unidentified.

Is this likely to be fixed? It's pretty sucky.

mo said...

Thanks to all the people, my migration has been without issues. Information and timing was great, keep up the good work.

Mo.

Unknown said...

I don't get 500 variety issues, but I do get a 404 from Google (so I know the mydomain has been redirected to Google).

http://rssfeeds.knoxnews.com/NoSilenceHere

What's up with that?

pinkym said...

Thats great!!!nice to know, that you will serving people as fast as possible in updating the content..good job

Anonymous said...

That's very nice post.Thanks for sharing...