AWS SimpleDB BatchPutAttributes returning 503 Service Unavailable

Question

Some of my batch calls are working (5 out of 8 succeeded). I have no idea why the other 3 batch calls are not working, please can anyone help? I am doing batch calls of 25 every 10 minutes.

Below is the ERROR logs:

SimpleDB domain: "Error executing "BatchPutAttributes" on "https://sdb.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com"; AWS HTTP error: Server error: `POST https://sdb.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com` resulted in a `503 Service Unavailable

Answer 1

I think your batch put operations or the from other tenants are just exhausting the SimpleDB instance with regular operations. The official documentation only says this about 503 error

503 Service Unavailable

Service Amazon SimpleDB is busy handling other requests, likely due to too many simultaneous requests. Consider reducing the frequency of your requests, and try again

There is no limit mentioned in the official documentation about the frequencey of operations. But you can try to check the response for BoxUsage element as mentioned here:

BoxUsage : The measure of machine utilization for this request. This does not include storage or transfer usage.

This may give you an indication about whether the machine handling your request is too busy.