Re: New Version Notification for draft-nottingham-httpbis-retry-01.txt

[Wenbo Zhu <[e-mail]>]

> "with some sites even requiring browsers to retry POST requests in order
to properly interoperate"

Do we know the exact reason (and scale) behind such a behavior?

On Fri, Feb 3, 2017 at 10:03 PM, Roy T. Fielding <[e-mail]> wrote:

> > On Feb 1, 2017, at 12:41 PM, Tom Bergan <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >
> > > Applications sometimes want requests to be retried by
> > > infrastructure, but can't easily express them in a non-idempotent
> > > request (such as GET).
> >
> > nit: did you mean "in an idempotent request (such as GET)"?
> >
> > > A client SHOULD NOT automatically retry a failed automatic retry.
> >
> > Why does RFC 7230 say this? I am aware of HTTP clients that completely
> ignore this suggestion, and I can't offhand think of a reason why this is a
> good rule-of-thumb to follow.
>
> This is only referring to retries due to a dropped connection. The reason
> is because a
> second connection drop is (in almost all cases) due to the request itself,
> as opposed to
> something transient on the network path.  [BTW, this doesn't refer to
> requests yet to be
> sent in a request queue or pipeline -- just the retried request in flight
> for which no response
> is received prior to FIN/RST (or equivalent).]
>



>
> There might be a good reason to go ahead and retry with an exponential
> back-off,
> but I don't know what that would be in general. I know lots of clients do
> stupid
> things because they are afraid of communicating server errors to their
> user.
>
> ....Roy
>
>
>