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503 Service Unavailable - Database timeout error

  • May 6, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 0 views
Phillip11

Hi!

I'm currently supporting a customer to export tickets and we are facing an error trying to collect all tickets using the /api/v2/incremental/tickets.json API.

After about 20 seconds we always get 503 status code with the error message: Database timeout error
Tried with Insomnia, Postman and Powershell
 

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

Some details: 

Plan: Team (3 Agents)
Inital API request: https://<company>.zendesk.com/api/v2/incremental/tickets.json?start_time=0

Response: 
{
    "error": {
        "title": "DatabaseError",
        "message": "Database timeout error"
    }
}
 

zendesk-ratelimit-incremental-exports: total=10; remaining=9; resets=32
 

Thank you.

    1 reply

    Greg29
    • Greg29
    • May 7, 2025

    Hi Phillip! I see that you are using cursor-based pagination for this request, along with a start time of 0, two things which are not ideal and could potentially be related to the timeouts that you're receiving. I would recommend reading this article on the topic of cursor-based pagination and using a start time that is around the creation of the account in question, and then subsequently changing to the cursor marker instead of time to ensure best results.

     

    To be clear, with the information provided I can't state for certain that this will absolutely resolve the issues, I just can't make a specific determination of the root issue, so I'm recommending best practices as a next step. If you continue to see the issues after implementing these changes, please have an admin on the account reach out to our Advocacy team so that they can check the logs for a more in-depth analysis of what may be going on here.

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