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voonsionglum's avatar
voonsionglum
Brass Contributor
Nov 29, 2021
Solved

Root bot, skill bot and scaling

Hi,   We need help with scaling.   Problem statement: With 2 instances of root bot running, a skill bot invocation is unable to return results reliably to the root bot.   With 1 instance of the...
developer
microsoft teams
  • Slacked2737's avatar
    Slacked2737
    Dec 14, 2022

    voonsionglum 

    We had James check his data and found this. See if it helps. In the root bot:

     

    • Double check and be 100% sure that you're using the SkillConversationIdFactory that is a part of the MS chatbot framework (NOT one that you may have created). It should have a IStorage constructor parameter that lets you pass in whatever storage you want to use to persist ids used with skills communication. You probably need to use the class that is given to you in the chatbot framework. (i.e. SkillConversationIdFactory that inherits from"Microsoft.Bot.Builder.Skills.SkillConversationIdFactoryBase")

     

    • For the IStorage object used by SkillConversationIdFactory, If you are using some kind of in-memory only storage, (i.e. A ConcurrentDictionary or other MemoryStorage type object), that might be a problem. The code in SkillConversationIdFactory might not be persisting the conversation/skill ID lookup data (needed to talk with skills) into a place that other apps can read.

     

    I have found some old MS examples that give a "demo" of how to use skills and shows a SkillConversationIdFactory that uses in-memory storage...which of course won't scale or work across different apps.

     

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.bot.builder.skills.skillconversationidfactory?view=botbuilder-dotnet-stable

     

     

HunaidHanfee-MSFT's avatar
HunaidHanfee-MSFT
Iron Contributor
Jan 18, 2022

Slacked2737 - Hello did you checked by installing the manifest I share? Also, can you elaborate more on the repro step to be make sure not missing anything.

voonsionglum's avatar
voonsionglum
Brass Contributor
Jan 21, 2022
HunaidHanfee-MSFT, would it be possible to have access to the actual web apps behind the manifest you have shared? We would like to view the code via Kudu console and examine the scale out settings that have been applied to both the root bot and skill dialog bot.
  • Slacked2737's avatar
    Slacked2737
    Copper Contributor
    Jan 21, 2022

    Thank you for the update.

    I reviewed most of the botbuilder-dotnet code and came to a few conclusions:

    - There does not seem to be much code related to ARR at all. My guess is that cookie affinity is not a part of the framework to support pinning root to skill calls.

    - Root to skill using DeliveryMode.ExpectReplies looks like it should work (and it sounds like you may have tried it already. Details would be great :-). Check out the code example below, it's a good template to how it works.

    https://github.com/microsoft/botbuilder-dotnet/blob/f28cad18948298f30cb7fc4973c143cf08ad7341/tests/Skills/Parent/ParentBot.cs#L77

    Also, check out how it's handled in the SendActivitiesAsync call:

    https://github.com/microsoft/botbuilder-dotnet/blob/f28cad18948298f30cb7fc4973c143cf08ad7341/libraries/Microsoft.Bot.Builder/TurnContext.cs#L373

     

    This does not explain why the 404 occurs in the first place. It would be nice to get a definitive answer on whether the root bots are able to share across instances, the skill bot responses.

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