271 responses intermittently timing out during peak hours — where should I look?
Asked by frontdesk_systems (EDI Practitioner) on 2026-09-01 · 640 views
Our real-time 270/271 eligibility checks work fine most of the day but start timing out during our 9-11am peak check-in window. The payer says their system is healthy on their end. Where should I focus troubleshooting first?
1 Answer
Before assuming it's the payer, check your own clearinghouse or gateway's connection pool size and timeout settings during that window — a very common cause is your outbound connection pool maxing out under concurrent load, causing queued requests to exceed the real-time SLA window (often 20-30 seconds) even though each individual request would succeed if sent alone. Also check whether you're reusing persistent connections vs. opening a new TLS handshake per request; at high concurrency that overhead adds up fast. I'd start by graphing request queue depth alongside timeout occurrences for that window before escalating further to the payer.
healthit_denise · EDI Expert · 2026-09-01