Plutus Pioneer Program - Problem with plutus playground client

Question

I'm setting up my environment to run the example from lecture #1 (Week01 auction)

All compilations went well but when I try the evaluate in the simulator I always receive:

interpreter Errors
ConnectionError (HttpExceptionRequest Request { host = "localhost" port = 8080 secure = False requestHeaders = [("Accept","application/json;charset=utf-8,application/json"),("Content-Type","application/json;charset=utf-8")] path = "/runghc" queryString = "" method = "POST" proxy = Nothing rawBody = False redirectCount = 10 responseTimeout = ResponseTimeoutDefault requestVersion = HTTP/1.1 } ResponseTimeout)
Please try again or contact support for assistance.

The plutus-playground-server log has the smartcontract and the datum so I think that the call for evaluation was correctly sent but somehow it doesn't come back to the client. In my opinion it's more an issue related to the npm but I don't know how to debug it.

I'm using Ubuntu, all the work done through nix-shell. Plutus tag: 3746610e53654a1167aeb4c6294c6096d16b0502

UPDATE

Further analysis brings me to the conclusion that my system is too slow for the client-server interaction. I saw that the issue is related only to the Auction contract (that's heavier than the demo ones) and watching the trace of the HTTP calls i notice that the /runghc POST takes 34 seconds to give back an answer.

Is there any way i can configure the playground server to consider a timeout higher than 30 secs?

Answer 1

You can try configuring the timeout in cardano/plutus/plutus-playground-client/webpack.config.js

devServer: {
    contentBase: path.join(__dirname, "dist"),
    compress: true,
    port: 8009,
    https: true,
    proxy: {
        "/api": {
            target: 'http://localhost:8080'
            timeout: 1000 * 60 * 10
        }
    } },

There also appears to be a proxyTimeout setting that you can try.

I can't reproduce the error on my end so I'm not sure if this will work, but it seems to make sense that the webpack server is timing out.

Here is a general question posted about webpack dev server timeouts that suggest trying the configurations I mentioned above.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47217090/how-can-i-let-webpack-dev-server-have-incoming-request-timeout-with-custom-value

Answer 2

This is indeed due to a timeout expiring.

It is not, however, a request sent by the browser timing out, so changing the client Webpack config will not solve the problem as @Frank suggests.

The Plutus Playground server uses WebGHC, served to a different localhost port, to compile the code, and submits the file to the WebGHC instance via a HTTP request. This may take some time to run, and on a slow machine, it can exceed the 30 second timeout.

To fix this, you'll need to dig in to the Haskell source of the playground server.

• In the Plutus directory, open the file plutus-playground-server/src/Playground/Server.hs in an editor.

• Change these lines:

  • (around line 29)

    import           Network.HTTP.Client.Conduit  (defaultManagerSettings)
    

    ==>

    import           Network.HTTP.Client.Conduit  (defaultManagerSettings, managerResponseTimeout, responseTimeoutMicro)
    

  • (around line 114)

    manager <- newManager defaultManagerSettings
    

    ==>

    manager <- newManager (defaultManagerSettings { managerResponseTimeout = responseTimeoutMicro (1000 * 60 * 1000000) })
    

• You'll then need to rebuild the server

  cd /path/to/plutus
  nix-build -A plutus-playground.server
  

  and then switch back to plutus-playground-client and re-run plutus-playground-server.

This has actually been fixed in more recent versions of the playground (to take a timeout on the command line), but the Pioneer Program is pinned to a specific commit, so won't get the update.