Typhoeus Revise: A Complete Guide to Upgrading Your HTTP RequestsTyphoeus Revise is an enhanced approach to making HTTP requests in Ruby applications, building on the familiarity and strengths of the original Typhoeus library while introducing updates that improve performance, reliability, and developer ergonomics. This guide covers why you might choose Typhoeus Revise, how it differs from the classic Typhoeus gem, installation and configuration, common patterns, error handling, performance tuning, testing strategies, and real-world examples that demonstrate best practices.
What is Typhoeus Revise and why upgrade?
Typhoeus historically provided a convenient Ruby wrapper around libcurl via Ethon, enabling concurrent HTTP requests with a straightforward API. Typhoeus Revise retains that core premise — powerful, concurrent HTTP requests — while addressing modern needs:
- Improved concurrency handling tailored for current Ruby runtimes and asynchronous patterns.
- Better defaults and safer timeouts to avoid thread exhaustion and stalled requests in production.
- Cleaner API surface for composing requests, handling responses, and retry policies.
- Enhanced integration points for metrics, logging, and observability.
- More robust error classification so transient vs permanent failures are easier to act on.
If your application performs many outbound HTTP calls (microservices, third-party APIs, web scraping, or batch jobs), Typhoeus Revise can reduce latency, improve throughput, and make failure modes more predictable.
Installing and configuring Typhoeus Revise
Installation typically follows standard Ruby gem patterns. Assuming the gem is published as typhoeus-revise (replace with actual gem name if different):
-
Add to your Gemfile:
gem 'typhoeus-revise' -
Run:
bundle install -
Basic initialization (example): “`ruby require ‘typhoeus/revise’
Configure global defaults
Typhoeus::Revise.configure do |config| config.max_concurrency = 20 config.default_timeout = 5 # seconds config.retry_policy = { max_retries: 2, base_delay: 0.25 } end
Key configuration knobs to consider: - max_concurrency: caps simultaneous connections to prevent overload. - default_timeout / connect_timeout: keep requests bounded. - retry_policy: simple exponential backoff settings. - proxy / ssl options: for corporate networks or custom CA bundles. - logger / hooks: to integrate tracing and metrics. --- ### Core concepts and API Typhoeus Revise keeps a familiar request/response model while making certain operations simpler. - Request creation: build requests with method, URL, headers, body, and options. - Request batching: queue multiple requests and execute them concurrently. - Response handling: access status, headers, body, timings, and error metadata. - Retries and backoff: automatic retry hooks for idempotent requests. - Middleware/hooks: attach preprocessors, postprocessors, or instrumentation. Example synchronous request: ```ruby response = Typhoeus::Revise.get('https://api.example.com/data', headers: { 'Accept' => 'application/json' }) if response.success? data = JSON.parse(response.body) else # handle non-success or inspect response.code / response.error end Example concurrent requests:
requests = [ Typhoeus::Revise::Request.new(:get, 'https://api.example.com/1'), Typhoeus::Revise::Request.new(:get, 'https://api.example.com/2'), Typhoeus::Revise::Request.new(:post, 'https://api.example.com/submit', body: { name: 'Alice' }.to_json) ] responses = Typhoeus::Revise::Client.new(queue_size: 10).run(requests) responses.each do |resp| puts "#{resp.request.url} -> #{resp.code}" end Error handling and classification
A strength of Typhoeus Revise is clearer error metadata. Typical response properties:
- response.code: HTTP status code (200, 404, 500, etc.)
- response.timed_out?: whether timing out occurred
- response.success?: status between 200–299 and no transport error
- response.connection_failed?: DNS, TCP, TLS errors surfaced
- response.server_error?: 5xx classification
- response.retryable?: based on configured retry_policy and idempotency
Best practices:
- Treat client errors (4xx) as application-level decisions — not automatically retried.
- Retry idempotent methods (GET, HEAD, PUT) on transient network errors and 5xx responses with exponential backoff.
- Use short timeouts for fast failures and avoid cascading resource pile-up.
- Surface request and response IDs in logs to correlate with server-side traces.
Performance tuning
To get the most from Typhoeus Revise, tune these areas:
- Concurrency limits: set max_concurrency based on machine resources and downstream API rate limits.
- Connection reuse: enable keep-alive to reduce connection setup latency.
- Timeout tuning: balance between slow-but-valid responses and wasting threads/connections.
- Batch sizing: split large job queues into smaller batches to reduce head-of-line blocking.
- Instrumentation: measure queue wait time, DNS resolution, connect time, and transfer time to find bottlenecks.
Example: enabling keep-alive and adjusting pool size:
Typhoeus::Revise.configure do |c| c.max_concurrency = 50 c.connection_pool_size = 25 c.keepalive = true end Retries and backoff strategies
Use exponential backoff with jitter to avoid thundering herd retries. A typical policy:
- base_delay = 0.1–0.5s
- multiplier = 2
- jitter = uniform(0, base_delay)
- max_retries = 2–5 depending on API reliability
Pseudo-configuration:
config.retry_policy = { max_retries: 3, base_delay: 0.2, multiplier: 2.0, jitter: true } Only retry safe/idempotent operations by default, but allow opt-in for POSTs when application-level idempotency keys are provided.
Instrumentation, logging, and observability
Attach hooks to emit metrics and logs for each request:
- metrics: request latency, request count, success/failure ratio, retries
- logs: include URL (possibly masked), method, status, latency, and correlation IDs
- traces: propagate distributed tracing headers (W3C Trace Context, B3) and instrument start/end
Example hook:
Typhoeus::Revise.on_complete do |response| StatsD.increment('http.requests', tags: ["code:#{response.code}"]) Rails.logger.info("[HTTP] #{response.request.method} #{response.request.url} #{response.code} #{response.total_time}s") end Testing strategies
- Use request stubbing libraries (WebMock, VCR) to assert behavior without external network calls.
- Test retry logic by simulating transient errors and verifying backoff attempts.
- Use load tests to validate concurrency and timeout settings against staging endpoints.
- Validate instrumentation by asserting metrics emitted per request.
Example with WebMock:
stub_request(:get, 'https://api.example.com/data') .to_return(status: 500).then .to_return(status: 200, body: '{"ok":true}') response = Typhoeus::Revise.get('https://api.example.com/data') # assert eventually success and retry occurred Real-world examples
- Microservice aggregator:
- Use concurrent requests to gather data from multiple internal services.
- Set conservative timeouts to avoid cascading failures.
- Aggregate partial results with clear error markers for downstream consumers.
- Bulk data importer:
- Batch requests with moderate concurrency.
- Persist failures and retry asynchronously with exponential backoff.
- Use idempotency keys for safe replays.
- Public API client:
- Respect rate limits with pause/retry logic.
- Cache responses where appropriate.
- Provide detailed error messages and status codes to calling code.
Migration tips from Typhoeus (classic)
- Map configuration keys: most settings will be familiar, but check renamed/removed options.
- Re-evaluate default timeouts — Revise likely favors safer, shorter defaults.
- Update retry logic to use new policy hooks rather than custom wrappers.
- Replace direct Ethon references with Revise client abstractions.
- Run integration tests under load to tune concurrency and pool sizes.
Common pitfalls
- Overly large concurrency on limited CPUs or with many TLS handshakes can harm performance.
- Long timeouts can tie up resources; prefer failures fast and retry patterns.
- Retrying non-idempotent requests without idempotency keys can cause duplicate side effects.
- Not masking sensitive data in logs (authorization headers, tokens).
Summary
Typhoeus Revise modernizes the Typhoeus approach to HTTP in Ruby by tightening defaults, improving concurrency handling, and making instrumentation and retry policies more robust. For apps that make many outbound HTTP calls, adopting Typhoeus Revise can yield lower latencies, more predictable failure behavior, and clearer observability. Start by installing the gem, applying conservative configuration, adding instrumentation, and running thorough tests under expected load.
If you want, I can:
- Provide a ready-to-drop-in initializer for Rails.
- Show migration diffs from classic Typhoeus to Typhoeus Revise.
- Create examples demonstrating retries with jitter and distributed tracing.