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Comment by vaduz | Hacker News Reader

First distrbuted computing fallacy is "Network is reliable".

Detecting if you can deliver a packet in advance is not exactly a solved problem - network detection APIs at best inform you if the PHY/MAC layer for a given connection is up, not if any given packet you generate can be routed out - and fail to detect a number of rather common edge cases (all traffic being routed over VPN on WiFi, without mobile fallback, for instance, or mobile connection appearing to be up, but not transferring data) - therefore ultimately the solution is to try, and try again, with proper backoff to prevent overwhelming your own infrastructure.

In this case the latter appears to have been missing.

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I've seen "Network is unreliable" being used as an argument to hide laziness. I do agree you can have flaky network, but the biggest give of the laziness behind the argument is not inspecting error codes at all. In this particular case 508 for example is clear indicator of some error status. Why would you even keep blind retries in place? I hate the argument of devs arguing for "dumb clients" and server "taking care of everything". Even for network failures IDK how having a retry within millisecond will actually help. It will be more detrimental to your infra, bandwidth, battery than a once or twice snappy experience argument.

Sure but that just falls under proper backoff. If they decide to use different backoff strategies for different classes if errors, that'd be great. But it's an easy mistake to make, and a very hard one to catch in testing. Sure if they wrote the code better (or been less "lazy") this wouldn't have happened, but that type of feedback isn't constructive imo. This wasn't a conscious decision that was made, it was written this way by default because of some combination of their team/framework/api client/testing/documentation/etc. Talking about why those led to this is much more interesting I think.

Smart server dumb client makes a lot of sense in the web-dev world, where the core client code is not under your control. As soon as you need to write your own app (Android/iOS/desktop), you should revisit this decision. The server should be able to serve a status code & header that requests the client to back off for a certain time period or with certain exponential parameters.

This is a very hard thing to deploy after the fact and can really save your bacon, especially if you have a number of very old clients still out in the field refusing auto-updates. Sure, you can refuse to serve them, but if they get stuck in a tight loop retrying until you do, you're pretty hosed.

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