When sending an invoice to Freeagent via the api to /v2/invoices we’ve recently started receiving the following response:
<html>
<head><title>504 Gateway Time-out</title></head>
<body>
<center><h1>504 Gateway Time-out</h1></center>
</body>
</html>
This does not happen every time, and repeating exactly the same request can result in it successfully going through.
This seemed to start happening around 24th February 2023 and we’ve seen this error a few times each week since.
Like I say it’s really not consistent, we’ve not made any changes to our codebase recently, so I think the actual request is fine.
Really not sure what to try next or how to debug any further. Any help much appreciated!
Hi Tom 
Thank you for getting in touch about this! We’re happy to take a look into this to see why you’re seeing the timeout message.
Would you be able to let me know the subdomain of the company you are trying to create invoices on?
Thanks,
Katie
Hi Katie,
I’m Tom’s colleague.
It’s mcircle.freeagent.com
Thanks,
Bruno
Hi Bruno & Tom,
Thanks for getting back to me!
We’ve been able to take a look into why you’ve been seeing 504 timeout issues. We’ve found that our network gateway had a shorter wait period than the app itself. The gateway would only wait for 1 minute, while the app would wait for 5. We can see that the requests that you have been sending have lasted for around 65 seconds, which is just over the limit that the gateway would stay open for, but well within the app’s timeout. Therefore, these requests have generally succeeded, but unfortunately it was just a little too late for you to get the success message.
Because of this difference in the timeframes, our Ops team are looking at increasing the timeout on the gateway to match the app’s timeout of 5 minutes. Once this is done, you should no longer see this “504 Gateway Time-out” message (unless they start taking longer than 5 minutes to complete! 
)
We also had a look into why the requests were taking a long time to complete, and this is due to the large number of invoices in the account itself. Unfortunately, as the number of invoices increase on the account, these queries are going to run slower.
We are taking a look to see if there’s anything we can do to speed up this process on our side, but it may be that there’s not much that can be done to improve the process. But in any case, these requests should stop giving you that error message in the near future once this timeout has been updated.
I hope this helps! And thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Kind regards,
Katie