How a Free Server Timeout Bug Caused a Webhook to Fire Twice and Duplicate Data
A developer building a webhook-based summarizer on a free server and free AI model discovered duplicate database entries for the same event the morning after deployment. Investigation revealed that the free server's gateway was dropping connections after roughly 10 seconds, while the AI model call took about 11 seconds on a cold start. Because the handler processed requests synchronously, the database write completed but the success response never reached the sender, which then retried the request as designed. The duplicate rows with differing summaries initially suggested a model error, but matching event IDs and a 48-second gap between entries pointed to a retry window instead. The developer resolved the issue by implementing an idempotency fix to prevent duplicate processing when the same event is received more than once.
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