Screen Recording API 500 Error During High-Concurrency Load Test

General Discussion
1

Could use a hand troubleshooting this specific failure mode in the Screen Recording API during our latest performance benchmarks.

Background

We are running a JMeter load test against v2/recording/sessions to validate system stability under high agent activity. The goal is to simulate 500 concurrent screen recording sessions starting simultaneously. We are using the Genesys Cloud Python SDK 3.0.2 for authentication and payload generation. The environment is a dedicated staging tenant with BYOC trunks configured for voice, but we are focusing purely on the data throughput of the recording endpoints here.

Issue

When concurrent requests exceed 200 simultaneous POST operations to initiate screen recordings, the API returns a generic 500 Internal Server Error with no detailed message body. The error rate spikes to nearly 40% at this threshold. Interestingly, voice recording initiation via v2/recording/jobs handles the same concurrency without issue. The screen recording endpoint seems to hit a hard capacity wall or a specific resource lock that voice does not encounter.

Troubleshooting

  • Verified OAuth tokens are valid and not expiring mid-test.
  • Reduced concurrency to 100 requests; all succeed. Increased to 150; 5% failure rate. At 200+, failures skyrocket.
  • Checked x-gc-request-id headers but the debug logs provided via support ticket only show “Request failed” without stack traces.
  • Confirmed no rate limit 429 responses are being received, which suggests this is not a standard throttling issue.

Is there a known backend limit for concurrent screen recording sessions per organization? Or is this a bug in the session creation handler that needs a ticket?

2

It depends, but generally… high concurrency often exposes gaps in how resource locking is handled during migration. When moving from Zendesk’s looser ticket updates to Genesys Cloud, the stricter API limits become apparent quickly.

Try implementing exponential backoff in your script. Zendesk tolerated rapid bursts, but Genesys Cloud requires more graceful handling of 500 errors to prevent session collisions.

3

It depends, but typically the 500 error during high-concurrency screen recording sessions is not a capacity issue with the backend, but rather a client-side timeout or malformed payload in the initial session handshake. The system expects the client to maintain a persistent WebSocket connection after the initial HTTP POST to v2/recording/sessions. If the JMeter script closes the connection immediately after receiving the 202 Accepted status, the server-side process may fail to initialize the recording stream correctly, resulting in a generic 500 Internal Server Error instead of a more specific 4xx code.

Try modifying your JMeter logic to ensure the HTTP request includes the correct Content-Type: application/json header and a valid JSON body with the type set to “screen”. Additionally, verify that your test environment has the necessary permissions for the API user to initiate recordings for the specific agent IDs being simulated. A common oversight is using an API key with read-only permissions, which will cause the server to reject the write operation internally.

For legal discovery purposes, we often see these errors when bulk export jobs are triggered without proper metadata tags. Ensure your load test includes unique recording_id parameters to avoid collision. The documentation suggests that screen recording sessions are stateful and require the client to poll the status endpoint every 2-3 seconds until the status changes to “completed” or “failed”. Ignoring this polling mechanism can lead to resource leaks on the server, triggering the 500 error under load. Check the X-Request-Id header in the response logs to correlate the failure with specific server-side trace IDs. This helps in distinguishing between a transient network glitch and a genuine API limitation.