rollbar-gem: Gem failsafe error generating 100ks of events when no network connection

Hi There! We’re running into a very annoying problem w/ Rollbar’s Ruby gem on a Rails installation where Rollbar itself is generating 100k errors it then tries to report. An example of this is this item:

Title:

Failsafe from rollbar-gem. SocketError: "Failed to open TCP connection to api.rollbar.com:443 (getaddrinfo: nodename nor servname provided, or not known)" in /.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.3.4/lib/ruby/2.3.0/net/http.rb:882:in `rescue in block in connect

Message:

Failsafe from rollbar-gem. SocketError: “Failed to open TCP connection to api.rollbar.com:443 (getaddrinfo: nodename nor servname provided, or not known)” in /.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.3.4/lib/ruby/2.3.0/net/http.rb:882:in `rescue in block in connect’: error in process_item

We suspect it's because something happens where the gem sense an internal connectivity issue, and queues an occurrence to be reported, but this exponentially spawns more errors. This may occur when the machine has a valid connection to the internet, but the internet service is poor or non-existent, resulting in DNS lookup failures, etc.

We have a Rails 4 app, Rollbar Ruby gem 2.15.0 and are using Sidekiq/Redis to schedule reporting to Rollbar in the background. We have seen this occur across multiple Ubuntu 16.04 installs and MacOS 10.12.6