ArcGIS Online (AGOL) Feature Service - increase resilience

​@nordpil ​@raghavendrans This is a known issue with ArcGIS Online. See this thread. You need to take these 2 bugs (BUG-000123780 and BUG-000124290) and notify esri that they still are occurring because it looks like they marked them as not reproducible ​@bruceharold  🤦 The solution the AGOL product team gave me (I worked on this case quite a long while) is to retry and backoff the requests, which is implemented in FME starting at 2019.1, so what you’re seeing is extended issues.

This issue is happening because the ArcGIS Online CDN (AWS Cloudfront) can’t handle the number of requests it’s receiving (which is shared infrastructure with every other AGOL org) and/or you’re org is doing a lot of requests to AGOL.

During my esri case (I spent at least 2 or 3 months on with Premium Support), I got to a point where I had an FME job setup to send an email to support (within my case) every time these errors popped up, so maybe you can do the same once you open a support ticket?

​@PierreAtSafe you can close this as Safe has already done all it can.

The October 2025 release of ArcGIS Online includes work done on hosted feature layer stability.  Unfortunately I can’t point to documentation.  If anyone is still experiencing issues please direct message me with details.

I wonder ​@bruceharold, (how) will the shift to the ArcGISOnlineConnector package-based workflow address these issues? 

My early understanding of the new workflow (I believe from a blog of yours) is that it encourages for example the use of temporary file gdb uploads and other means to reduce the number of REST API calls and load on the CDN, to ensure greater reliability of transactions etc.  So a little more on the FME developer than ESRI, but to address issues via those means.

That may encourage - for example - increased use of overwrite operations rather than truncate or even insert; I have had issues with truncating/inserting with moderately large (5-10,000 or sometimes more) numbers of features this past couple of years - at least before upgrading to FME 2025 - to the point where it started to become a little concerning in FME 2024.

Hi ​@chriswilson I tend to avoid large AGOL transactions like an upsert in preference to change detection and writing the delta only.  In support of this I hope to see faster feature service reading where I was using export and download of a file geodatabase to calculate the delta, we’ll see if the backlog issue I created sticks.  The Esri ArcGIS Connector package uses the same API calls as the legacy reader/writers but as I say work has been done on resilience in AGOL.  I’m sure there has been work done in FME too.  With respect to the issues raised in this thread I believe things are much better now, if not let us know.

Good points Bruce, and I had missed that this idea was in fact just archived, but I think the conversation has still been worthwhile with the migration between legacy and connector workflows.  There will of course be times when the larger-scale transactions are needed, however the more surgical option(s) will always be worth keeping in mind to reduce the risk of issues.