Frequently Asked Questions

Date of slack thread: 8/13/24

Anonymous: Hi Team - statis server sdk goes into uninitialized state in a perfectly running cluster

Some Context & Issue we faced:

• We use java sdk for statsig. During server startup we initialize SDK. If initialization fails, the service won’t come up. So there is no way a call will be made to statsig from our app without proper initialization.
• If statsig feature gate get API fails for any reasons, we flag the feature as not activated (default value or fallback) for a given user.
• Recently we noticed one instance (in a specific application node), where all statsig requests were returning default values and upon inspecting the statsig diagnostics, we noticed that the error is “SDK uninitializaed” which is very strange. Check the below screeshot for the same. Here is the sessionId - ac3892c6-acfe-41f5-9826-6cc3f2d3be08

Question:

1. How did we end up in this state?
2. How do we detect such errors from our app? Does GetFeatureGate API return this additional info?

Anonymous: CC: @U06TKQHEJJ3

Vijaye (Statsig): @U05FS9BH6AH

Xin Li (Statsig): Hi - thanks for reporting. Which version you are on? We fixed a bug on 1.23.0, the bug is that if sdk failed to initialize, config sync will never catch up from config syncing.

Anonymous: Hi Xin - Thanks for the reply. Wanted to clarify few things.

In our case, initialization went fine, so it is not a question of initialization issue. For a few days, all feature gate/config accesses were also just fine. However, all of a sudden, only one node of the cluster (that has many nodes) has got into this trouble state. Note that, all other nodes were running fine too at the exact time.

We have shared a session-id, screen-shot, etc. in the original post.

Can you please review the data, and your backend diagnostics and help us understand the underlying issue.

Thank you.

Xin Li (Statsig): Hi - Sorry I didn’t explain clear enough on what happened. Found out that you are using 1.12.0. Here is what happened:

1. The sdk you are using has a bug that if initialization failed, for example, failed to get a network response for initialization, sdk will stuck in uninitialized state (even afterwards download config spec response succeeded).
2. In past 5 days, we have seen initialization success rate regressed from 100% to 90%. This expose the bug 1). Hope this answer question 1 For question 2, diagnostics stream is the best tool you have for right now. We are trying to improve the debuggability of sdk by exposing sdk health data