48
Good Retry, Bad Retry: An Incident Story
(medium.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
48 points (92.9% liked)
Technology
59689 readers
1934 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Hmm... I'd say that was an obvious example to cause the situation, the real point was exposing the more subtle problems with feedback loops.
What happens if the server in question was at 80% capacity, and due to hardware faults, that leads to 100% utilization? Can you reconfigure your services if there's a cascading overload through enough of the system without actually adding to the system load? What do you do about the fact that these loops gets ever more powerful and sudden the larger the system?
The author seemed to be suggesting that we carefully consider how to avoid open feedback loops, and build stability in. This article clued me in that stability problems can be borne from "industry standard" advice if you don't carefully think about it.
Ideally, you'd limit your resource utilization to always leave enough of a buffer that your management tools can run. But even if that's not the case, you should also be able to disable incoming traffic so that your servers stop even seeing the requests. Or you can just plain destroy and recreate with a new version.
But none of that addresses the fact that your retrying clients are basically DDoSing you. That can be mitigated by your WAF filtering requests so that only a fraction are passed to the server, as mentioned in the article, but preferably you'd just scale up to handle the load, or fix your clients to retry less frequently so that they don't DDoS you with retries. Even a large number of clients shouldn't be retrying so frequently that it overwhelms your system. Even if you're selling Taylor Swift tickets, where millions of clients are hammering you, you can scale horizontally to at least implement a queue for users so they're not hitting refresh every time they get a blank screen.
All of what you're saying seems correct. I think this is more of a meta discussion, on how (in this case) retries, even with exponential back off, aren't a solution by themselves when you look at the system overall. There are interesting hidden caveats to any common solutions, this is one I personally wasn't aware of.
Practically, adding a timeout budget so that the clients themselves just error out (forcing a manual refresh) sorta accomplishes the same as what you're positing.