Call to `googleapiclient.discovery.build` hangs for several minutes

We’ve (the Cloud Profiler team) been seeing some prober and E2E test failures for our python agent (repo at https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-profiler-python) where calls to googleapiclient.discovery.build hangs for until our benchmark application finishes (this is 10 minutes), and are wondering if this is expected.

Environment details

• OS type and version: Linux (Using GCP image project ubuntu-os-cloud and image family ubuntu-1804-lts)
• Python version: Python 3.5
• pip version: pip --version
• google-api-python-client version: 1.12.3 (will confirm this)

Steps to reproduce

This is consistently happening in our E2E tests and probers which run on GCE VMs in us-west2-a (we also run probers in asia-east1-c and europe-west1-b, which aren’t experiencing this) when we call:

 googleapiclient.discovery.build(
        'cloudprofiler',
        'v2',
        http=http,
        cache_discovery=False,
        requestBuilder=ProfilerHttpRequest,
        discoveryServiceUrl= googleapiclient.discovery.DISCOVERY_URI)

[busunkim96]

I would recommend downloading the discovery json and using build_from_document. https://github.com/googleapis/google-api-python-client/blob/30eff9d8276919b8c4e50df2d3b1982594423692/googleapiclient/discovery.py#L394 That way you won’t be dependent on the discovery doc being up.

This quarter we’ll be restructuring the library to have a copy of all the discovery docs locally so the workaround will be temporary.

[busunkim96]

Incident is now resolved.