‘The requested skill took too long to respond.’

Glitch Help
1

I host a few Alexa skills here.

I’ve noticed that the first time I call up the skill from my echo, it takes longer than the 8 or so seconds Amazon allows for a response, and Alexa says ‘The requested skill took to long to respond.’ However, if I make the same request again, I get the response straight away.

Is this to do with the function sleeping which I often see on this forum? Is the solution to use something like uptime robot? That feels like cheating and maybe stretching the conditions of using glitch. Is it time for me to move the code to AWS lambda?

2

Hi @funkydan2,

it is fine to use the uptime robot for now, until we provide an alternative. As for the 8-seconds startup time, can you tell me the project names of the bots that take so long, so that I can investigate? Do they always take more than 8 seconds, or just sometimes?

Thanks!

1 Like
3

Thanks for that. I didn’t want to use the uptimerobot to force processes to stay running if it’s unnecessary.

At the moment, all my alexa skills are timing out each time I try. They aren’t used all that regularly to really test.

The project names on glitch are:

The ‘8 seconds’ is approximately how long Alexa gives skills to receive a request, process it, and return a response. So it may not take the full 8 seconds to wake up…but it doesn’t get the response back before Alexa gives up waiting.