504, Gateway Timeout can occur to any website or web application, no matter how giant that application or site be.
Recently I came across the same experience with Quora, where people are continuously searching, posting, responding from all over the globe and is expected to be available 24×7.
Now what is this 504 error anyway, which is getting so famous as the web applications are growing. If we search over any search engine, let say Google then we’ll get the below definition or similar to this one;
“The 504 Gateway Timeout error is an HTTP status code that means that one server did not receive a timely response from another server that it was accessing while attempting to load the web page or fill another request by the browser.”
Many of us now a days educated enough either by the experience or by learning books that we know what is 504 error, I mean common thing right, but think about those who don’t understand these numbers, how can we explain them?
I think in a lay man term we can say it’s kind of Relay Race, where one participant has to wait for his counterpart to give him baton / flag then only he can complete the race. In case of the counterpart doesn’t reach to him, mean time up, race up there will be 504 error.
Otherwise if I make someone who doesn’t know computer much to understand how server works, how they communicate with each may create a 504 error on my face when there will connection break between my mind and face. There may be 404, 400, 405, 403, 406 and at the end, there will be 503.
To conclude, there are so many dependencies, so many teams, lots of resources which are behind the scene working for us to help us what we want to see or what we want to get. Saying Quora is not working well might not be correct in such scenario, the glitch and outage can happen, what matters that how soon that gets corrected or rectified.
Hope you agree, don’t you?
Cheers!
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