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question

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How to fix no response error

Hi there!

I've been working on an Alexa skill for some time now, that's inconsistently getting the error that says something along the lines of remote endpoint couldn't be reached or the response was invalid. The general flow of the skill is as follows:

1. Get command from user

2. Match the command to the intent accordingly

3. Request data from another server

4. Put the request and the received data into a database

The requested data is currently being hard-coded to further narrow down where the problem is. When I make a request, sometimes I get the no response error, sometimes Alexa responds but the request doesn't make it to the database, and every once in awhile Alexa will respond and the request will be placed in the database. For some reason, the only way to guarantee getting entries into the database is to make a lot of rapid requests (I just hold down the enter button when testing the skill in the developer console), and even that doesn't get all of the requests put in the database. Any sort of assistance would be much appreciated!

alexa skills kitalexalambdanode_js
10 |5000

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1 Answer

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jjaquinta answered

Alexa has a timeout. If your skill does not respond in time, then it will be deemed "unresponsive".

Are you doing all of this in Lambda? My own experience was that Lambda did not perform well enough to do any significant processing like database i/o or remote API calls. I kept running out of time budget. And, since you can't cache in a Lambda function, that gave me little opportunity to optimize it. So I switched to a web service.

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