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Phil WPhil W 

Intermittent issues with Visualforce Remoting: Are you suffering too?

We have several parts of our 1GP managed package that pre-date Lightning. They were implemented as Visualforce pages and leverage VFRemoting to provide Web 2.0 style, interactive behaviour. Towards the end of March this year (i.e. well into the use of Salesforce Platform's Spring '21 release) several of our customers started complaining about intermittent and random errors on these pages, of the form:
 
Remoting request invalid for your session. Refresh the page and try again.
 
These happened (and still happen) for customers using both Classic and LEX. These errors prevent the pages from rendering, and all-too-frequently persist after refreshes.
 
This has been going on for about 3 and a half months at this point, and we appear to be back to square one!
 
Is anyone else having this issue? How can we get better, focused and concerted support and resolution from the Salesforce team? At least one of our customers (that I know of) are unable to go live with our product because of this, and it is damaging other customers' ability to use the product in their business.

TL;DR Some background detail:
 
Following our own due diligence investigation and the discovery that this same issue can hit (pretty much?) any of our pages that use VFRemoting and across more than 5 of our customers' orgs, we raised this with Salesforce Support resulting in case 29500664, raised on 25th March. Given the critical nature of the impact of these intermittent, but too frequent issues have on our customers' users we escalated this issue.
 
This case resolved in a data-centre-specific "programmatic fix", which unfortunately didn't stop our customers experiencing problems with our VF pages.
 
At the start of July the specific error seen, revealed in the HAR logs we continued to provide to Salesforce Support, apparently changed into a timeout problem (which apparently has no footprint on Salesforce's own server-side logs). Salesforce Support insisted that we open a new case and thus was born case 30405897, raised yesterday (7th July). As always, this means we're wading through the usual Level 1 support script dialogue with the support rep, which is quite unhelpful given the critical nature of the issue.
 
29500664 summary
 
After quite a bit of back and forth (as usual) we were asked to capture HAR files when the error occurred (which we did ASAP). We were told this problem was "due to the issue we've had with K2K connectivity on Mesh issue, sometimes networking".
 
Over a month after raising the issue we were told that "as per the update from R&D team, necessary corrections were made. The changes were rolled out Thursday. The configuration pushed by control plane was incorrect when the incidents occurred".
 
However, the problem persisted and about a week later (5th May) we got "we have a programmatic fix coming but it will take at least a week. In the meantime we are adding a new top-priority alert for the trigger condition for this today, to expedite the request and minimize impact. An important part to note is that this is not an org-specific or data-related issue. It's a networking edge case issue that may happen during core app restart."
 
On 3rd June we had a message that a "programmatic fix" had been applied on one specific instance (CS80), which was very odd since this was impacting multiple customers who were not all on one instance.
 
After further discussions we were told that the issue was data-centre related and that it would take further time to investigate and resolve.
 
At the end of this, on 7th July, we were told the error had changed and a new Support Case was required.
PriyaPriya (Salesforce Developers) 

Hi Phil,

You can re-raise the ticket with salesforce if you ever come across such situation.

regards,

Priya Ranjan

Phil WPhil W
Hi Priya,
You misunderstand; our original case is still there. We were instructed, by Support, to raise a secondary case simply because the underlying error changed (though we get the same end-user error message). Madness.
Phil
Phil WPhil W
After more interaction with Salesforce Support, it looks like the "programmatic fix" Salesforce has applied has resolved the issue (98% sure).