Performance issues and HTTP timeouts when sending Status to 37k contacts (GOWS engine)

[YosefAdPro]

Hi everyone,

I’m running a high-volume setup using WAHA (GOWS engine) on a very powerful server. I'm trying to send a Status (Story) to approximately 37,000 contacts, but I'm consistently hitting performance bottlenecks and HTTP timeouts.

My current setup:

Engine: GOWS

Infrastructure: Laravel (Worker) communicating with WAHA via REST API (Nginx).

Batching: I split the 37k contacts into chunks of 512 contacts per request.

Delay: 20 seconds interval between each chunk/request.

Server Specs: High-end CPU/RAM (resource usage stays relatively low during the process).

The Problem:
After a few successful chunks, I start receiving cURL error 28: Operation timed out from my application. It seems like the WAHA REST API stops responding or becomes extremely slow to acknowledge the request, even though the internal engine might still be processing.

Logs show that sometimes two different stories (from different jobs) overlap, causing simultaneous requests which immediately triggers the timeouts.

Questions:

Is 512 contacts per request too much for the GOWS engine to handle in a single POST request? Should I decrease the chunk size further?

Is there a specific internal configuration or environment variable in WAHA to optimize the REST API layer for high-concurrency or large payloads?

Would switching to a web socket or a different communication method between my app and WAHA help avoid these HTTP timeouts?

Are there any known limits to how many "Status" broadcast IDs the engine can track in memory before it slows down?

Any advice on how to scale this to 40k+ contacts without crashing the API layer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!