[Yum-devel] [PATCH] fix retries; add backoff on retry

[Jay Soffian]

On 1/18/08, James Antill <james.antill at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 02:49 -0500, Jay Soffian wrote:
> > This patch does two things:
> >
> > 1) It fixes retries. YumOuput.failureReport() re-raising the
> > errobj.exception prevents urlgrabber from retrying.
>
>  This is for the non-mirror failure mode, if you keep retrying here you
> might be re-downloading something that is "working" from the HTTP POV,
> but failing the checks post download.
>  So you'd need some way to distinguish between a temporary network
> problem and a data problem.

I'm not sure what you mean by "non-mirror failure mode".
failureReport() is registered as the URLGrabber failure_callback, so
it's called for any download failures, regardless of the number of
URLs configured for the repo.


> > 2) In order to be friendly to the HTTP server, it adds a random
> > exponential backoff delay between retry attempts.
>
>  This seems like a bad idea, much better to just go for between 2 and 16
> seconds or something.

Uh, it's worked well enough in Ethernet for 30+ years. It seems to
work well in my experience as well (I've stress tested against a local
server).

> > This is against 3.0.x.
>
>  That's _old_, there's going to be a lot of stuff fixed by just
> upgrading.

According http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/download.ptml there are
several stable releases:

- 3.2.x
- 3.0.x
- 2.6.x
- 2.4.x

Are you not interested in fixing bugs in older releases? At least the
3.0.x branch is in use by EL5.

j.