USPS Plugin error

I'm getting the following error message in the logs whenever shipping is calculated or estimated using the USPS plugin.  Anyone else experiencing this?  Any ideas what it means?  It just started today and I am assuming it is on the USPS side of things but have yet to hear back from their support about it. UPS plugin and the rest of the store is working fine:

"Shipping (USPS (US Postal Service)). USPS Error returned: Error Desc: ZipOrigination: Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to obtaining a connection from the pool. This may have occurred because all pooled connections were in use and max pool size was reached.USPS Help Context"

Same here...the international rates are still working, but none of the domestic carrier services are ever returned.
We've already lost nearly $1,000 in revenue for the day because of this...
Enabling UPS doesn't help much because their rates are so high that folks abandon their cart as soon as they see the rates...

In addition to the error posted by stargate1234, on occasion, this error precedes it:

Shipping (USPS (US Postal Service)). USPS Error returned: Error Desc: Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to obtaining a connection from the pool. This may have occurred because all pooled connections were in use and max pool size was reached.USPS Help Context: .

I know that it must be referring to the pool on the USPS server, as mine can be recycled and still the error appears immediately after.

Still don't know what happened but it looks like we may be working again...fingers crossed.

It's still intermittently failing on my site...
I've set up fixed rates until USPS gets their act together...

For what it's worth...
Shipping Director should be able to handle detecting a problem like this.  Read about the $ShippingOptionsCount variable.

(It won't, however, be able to prevent a long wait time.  Did you notice how long the delay was before USPS returned the error message?  Also, what did the customer see - "shipping options could not be loaded"?)

New York wrote:

Okay, when I write an expression using that variable, will the integer value it sets be the total of ALL carrier services returned, plus any static ones defined, such as "In-store Pickup"? Or will the value be representative of only the services returned by one particular carrier at a time?

I mean... would the variable value be a total of all the UPS and USPS and static options, combined?
Or do I need to just inject an if/then into one of the expression columns in each of my existing SD option records? (if so, which expression column?)

I have no idea on the timeout period before the error was returned, and no error was returned to the screen at all for customers...just the absence of any rates other than "In-Store Pick-up"

Thanks!

For us this seemed to have started just before noon EST yesterday. I didn't time the delay but I am estimating 20-30 seconds. Our site was returning the USPS error to the customer which of course was really confusing.

I have not seen this before. Any idea if it has happened in the past? Trying to decide if it is worth expending a lot of time to figure out a work around. Of course we all know that past performance means very little moving forward :)

embryo wrote:

$ShippingOptionsCount is reset to 0 just before each call to other shipping providers, so it is " representative of only the services returned by one particular carrier at a time".

RE: "...no error was returned to the screen at all for customers...just the absence of any rates other than "In-Store Pick-up"

It could be your shipping setting for "Return valid options if there are any".


marc1b wrote:
If your customers saw the message, than as per above, it could be your shipping setting for "Return valid options if there are any", or even if you have that set true, if you are only using USPS, then there would not have been any others to return.

Yes, we've seen this before, although it's typically intermittent and very short.  I've never heard of them being down for hours.  There are sites that monitor downtime; this example site does not seem to reflect yesterday's outage, but if USPS is returning with their own 'timeout' error message, then it won't be seen as a non-response by those sites.

We're going to look into adding a feature to Shipping Director to make calls to other shipping providers asynchronously.

Thanks for the explanation New York!

I'm using ShippingDirector and USPS exclusively now, so I will create a fallback shipping method(fixed rates) to automatically resort to should USPS have issues again.

I've had theses same kinds of problems with both UPS and USPS over the past 15 years. Never for as long a period as yesterday, but always a revenue-losing/customer service fiasco, no matter how long it lasts.

Steve