At Aperture Labs, we excel at quickly identifying and resolving issues during development, which minimizes downtime for our clients. Recently, we encountered a challenge while deploying an outbound connector in inriver to production. Here’s how we diagnosed the issue, found the root cause, and fixed it fast.
Our client’s outbound connector had been running smoothly in a test environment for six months. It records states, builds a JSON representation, and pushes data to a Kafka topic. The JSON includes product images as indexed fields (Url1, Url2, etc.).
When we deployed to production and published 44,000 items, the last 3,100 messages were rejected by Kafka for exceeding the 1MB limit. Given that expected sizes were around 100KB, something was drastically inflating payloads.
To pinpoint the issue, we injected a local file publisher to inspect payloads. They averaged 93KB–114KB—far below the 1MB limit. The breakthrough came when our client retrieved a rejected message: a resource URL field name had ballooned to over 800KB, causing oversized payloads.
A recent model caching change led to an unintended consequence. The connector’s logic appended an index for each language to the field name. Instead of generating a new locale string, it modified the cached model — causing exponential field name growth in a connected environment.
This issue never appeared in local tests because caching only affected the connector runtime. Previously, the name refreshed upon retrieval, but with caching, it accumulated excess data.
Once identified, the fix was simple: we created a new locale string for each instance, preventing unwanted modifications to the cached model.
Result? The remaining 3,100 messages were processed instantly.
This experience underscores the value of deep platform expertise. Our team:
For businesses relying on inriver, unexpected issues can cause costly delays. This is why working with experts who diagnose and resolve problems efficiently is critical.
At Aperture Labs, we don’t just solve problems - we prevent them from becoming roadblocks. If you need an expert in optimizing and troubleshooting inriver, let’s talk!