Failure is a way of life. Requests(http or others..) can fail for many reasons. Decision to stop or retry can be very critical for applications. backoff algorithms provide a way to backoff and retry on a failure. There are two popular methods to backoff, constant backoff and exponential backoff.
I use backoff library, which is a Go port of exponential backoff algorithm from Google’s HTTP Client Library for Java.
backoff provides 4 main functionalities. Constant Backoff, Exponential Backoff, Retry, and Retry with Notify
Based on application needs, we can use either constant backoff or exponential backoff. Here are some examples of both.
Constant BackOff is a backoff policy that always returns the same backoff delay.
package main
import "github.com/cenkalti/backoff"
func main(){
b := backoff.NewConstantBackOff(1*time.Second)
err = backoff.Retry(doSomething(), b)
if err != nil{
log.Fatalf("error after retrying: %v", err)
}
}
func doSomething() error {
//do something and return error
var err error
return err
}
ExponentialBackOff is a backoff implementation that increases the backoff period for each retry attempt using a randomization function that grows exponentially.
package main
import "github.com/cenkalti/backoff"
func main(){
b := backoff.NewExponentialBackOff()
b.MaxElapsedTime = 3 *time.Minute
err = backoff.Retry(doSomething(), b)
if err != nil{
log.Fatalf("error after retrying: %v", err)
}
}
func doSomething() error {
//do something and return error
var err error
return err
}
That is fine but what if your function returns a tuple of value and error and you also want to log the initial errors. How do you retry that function using backoff library.
package main
import "github.com/cenkalti/backoff"
func main(){
b := backoff.NewExponentialBackOff()
b.MaxElapsedTime = 3 *time.Minute
var (
var int64
err error
)
retryable := func() error {
val, err = doSomething()
}
notify := func(err error, t time.Duration){
log.Printf("error: %v happened at time: %v", err, t)
}
err = backoff.RetryNotify(retryable, b, notify)
if err != nil{
log.Fatalf("error after retrying: %v", err)
}
}
func doSomething() (int64, error) {
return 6, nil
}