Struggling with third-party API integration timing out — any tips?

1

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on integrating a third-party payment API into our web app, and I’m running into some strange timeout issues. Everything works fine in dev mode, but once deployed, the API calls sometimes take too long or fail completely. I’ve checked headers, SSL, and even server logs but can’t figure out the root cause.

Has anyone faced something similar? Could it be a server config issue or maybe a rate limit I’m unaware of? Would love to hear your experience or any debugging tips that helped you out in a similar situation. Appreciate any input!

2

One thing that helped me was checking how the production environment handles DNS resolution and SSL handshakes—it’s surprising how different it can be from local setups. Also, if there’s any kind of reverse proxy or load balancer involved, timeout settings there could be the bottleneck. I’d recommend logging exact response times and adding retry logic with backoff where possible. Sometimes just wrapping calls in a circuit breaker pattern can give you better insight into failure patterns.