Perplexity advanced troubleshooting

Perplexity Advanced Troubleshooting

Overview

Deep debugging for Perplexity Sonar API issues that resist standard fixes. Common hard problems: inconsistent citations between identical queries, intermittent timeouts on sonar-pro, search results not matching recency filter, and response quality degradation.

Prerequisites

• Access to production logs and metrics
• curl for direct API testing
• Understanding of Perplexity's search-augmented generation model

Diagnostic Tools

Layer-by-Layer Test

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail
echo "=== Perplexity Layer Diagnostics ==="

# Layer 1: DNS
echo -n "1. DNS: "
dig +short api.perplexity.ai || echo "FAIL"

# Layer 2: TCP connectivity
echo -n "2. TCP: "
timeout 5 bash -c 'echo > /dev/tcp/api.perplexity.ai/443 && echo "OK"' 2>/dev/null || echo "FAIL"

# Layer 3: TLS handshake
echo -n "3. TLS: "
echo | openssl s_client -connect api.perplexity.ai:443 2>/dev/null | grep -c "Verify return code: 0" | sed 's/1/OK/;s/0/FAIL/'

# Layer 4: HTTP with auth
echo -n "4. Auth: "
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PERPLEXITY_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"sonar","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"test"}],"max_tokens":5}' \
  https://api.perplexity.ai/chat/completions

echo ""

# Layer 5: Response quality
echo "5. Quality check:"
RESPONSE=$(curl -s \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PERPLEXITY_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"sonar","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"What is 2+2?"}],"max_tokens":50}' \
  https://api.perplexity.ai/chat/completions)

echo "   Model: $(echo $RESPONSE | jq -r '.model')"
echo "   Answer: $(echo $RESPONSE | jq -r '.choices[0].message.content' | head -c 100)"
echo "   Citations: $(echo $RESPONSE | jq -r '.citations | length')"
echo "   Tokens: $(echo $RESPONSE | jq -r '.usage.total_tokens')"

Inconsistent Citation Investigation

// Same query can return different citations due to live web search
// Run N times and compare to identify pattern vs randomness

async function citationStabilityTest(query: string, runs: number = 5) {
  const results: Array<{ citations: string[]; answer: string }> = [];

  for (let i = 0; i < runs; i++) {
    const response = await perplexity.chat.completions.create({
      model: "sonar",
      messages: [{ role: "user", content: query }],
      max_tokens: 500,
    });

    results.push({
      answer: response.choices[0].message.content || "",
      citations: (response as any).citations || [],
    });

    await new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, 2000)); // Rate limit
  }

  // Analyze consistency
  const allCitations = results.flatMap((r) => r.citations);
  const citationFreq = allCitations.reduce((acc, url) => {
    acc[url] = (acc[url] || 0) + 1;
    return acc;
  }, {} as Record<string, number>);

  const stable = Object.entries(citationFreq)
    .filter(([, count]) => count >= runs * 0.6)
    .map(([url]) => url);

  console.log(`Stable citations (>60% appearance): ${stable.length}/${Object.keys(citationFreq).length}`);
  console.log("Stable:", stable);
  console.log("All unique:", Object.keys(citationFreq).length);

  return { results, citationFreq, stableCitations: stable };
}

Latency Profiling

async function profileLatency(
  queries: string[],
  models: string[] = ["sonar", "sonar-pro"]
) {
  const results: Array<{
    query: string;
    model: string;
    latencyMs: number;
    tokens: number;
    citations: number;
  }> = [];

  for (const model of models) {
    for (const query of queries) {
      const start = performance.now();
      try {
        const response = await perplexity.chat.completions.create({
          model,
          messages: [{ role: "user", content: query }],
          max_tokens: 500,
        });

        results.push({
          query: query.slice(0, 50),
          model,
          latencyMs: Math.round(performance.now() - start),
          tokens: response.usage?.total_tokens || 0,
          citations: (response as any).citations?.length || 0,
        });
      } catch (err: any) {
        results.push({
          query: query.slice(0, 50),
          model,
          latencyMs: Math.round(performance.now() - start),
          tokens: 0,
          citations: 0,
        });
      }

      await new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, 1500));
    }
  }

  // Print report
  console.table(results);

  const byModel = results.reduce((acc, r) => {
    if (!acc[r.model]) acc[r.model] = [];
    acc[r.model].push(r.latencyMs);
    return acc;
  }, {} as Record<string, number[]>);

  for (const [model, latencies] of Object.entries(byModel)) {
    const sorted = latencies.sort((a, b) => a - b);
    console.log(`${model}: p50=${sorted[Math.floor(sorted.length * 0.5)]}ms p95=${sorted[Math.floor(sorted.length * 0.95)]}ms`);
  }
}

Recency Filter Validation

// Verify search_recency_filter is actually working
async function testRecencyFilter() {
  const query = "latest technology news";
  const filters: Array<"hour" | "day" | "week" | "month"> = ["hour", "day", "week", "month"];

  for (const filter of filters) {
    const response = await perplexity.chat.completions.create({
      model: "sonar",
      messages: [{ role: "user", content: query }],
      search_recency_filter: filter,
      max_tokens: 200,
    } as any);

    const citations = (response as any).citations || [];
    console.log(`\nRecency: ${filter}`);
    console.log(`  Citations: ${citations.length}`);
    console.log(`  Answer preview: ${(response.choices[0].message.content || "").slice(0, 100)}...`);

    await new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, 2000));
  }
}

Support Escalation Template

## Perplexity Support Escalation

**Issue:** [Brief description]
**Severity:** [P1-P4]
**First observed:** [ISO 8601 timestamp]
**Frequency:** [Always / Intermittent / Once]

### Steps to Reproduce
1. Call `POST https://api.perplexity.ai/chat/completions`
2. Body: `{"model": "sonar", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "..."}]}`
3. Observed: [What happened]
4. Expected: [What should happen]

### Evidence
- Layer diagnostic results: [paste output]
- Latency profile: [p50/p95 values]
- Citation stability: [X/Y stable citations]
- Response JSON: [attach]

### Workarounds Attempted
1. [Workaround] — Result: [outcome]

Error Handling

Issue	Cause	Solution
Different citations per call	Web search is non-deterministic	Cache results; accept variability
recency filter ignored	Query overrides filter context	Make query explicitly time-bounded
sonar-pro timeout	Complex multi-source search	Set 30s timeout, fall back to sonar
Answer quality varies	Different web sources found	Use search_domain_filter for consistency

Output

• Layer-by-layer diagnostic results
• Citation stability analysis
• Latency profiling by model
• Support escalation package

Resources

• Perplexity Community Forum
• Perplexity API Documentation

Next Steps

For load testing, see perplexity-load-scale.