Forum Discussion

Brass Contributor

Nov 28, 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
Dec 13, 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

voonsionglum

Brass Contributor

Dec 13, 2022

I had to go back and double check with my counterpart, whom I have worked with to resolve the rootbot scaling issue. He was experimenting with the ExpectReplies workaround and what we found was that the workaround did not resolve the rootbot scaling issue. The skillbot was still unable to reliably return the skill results to the correct rootbot instance.

We initially thought that the deprecated types and the NodeJS bot framework version might play a part in the solution not working. However, we updated all of our dependencies and code to use the latest release and we still could not get the solution to work.

Microsoft says they found no issues on their end. I am hoping if your team can reproduce this problem, it would be an incentive for Microsoft to dig a little deeper.

Slacked2737

Copper Contributor

Dec 13, 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