[Zope-dev] time.sleep in a boolean check in zope.publisher.http.HTTPRequest.supportsRetry?

[Gary Poster]

On Aug 20, 2009, at 1:50 PM, Jim Fulton wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 1:43 PM, Gary Poster<gary.poster at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
>> Two teams here at Canonical just encountered the STAGGER_RETRIES
>> behavior in http://svn.zope.org/zope.publisher/trunk/src/zope/publisher/http.py?rev=101538&view=auto
>>  .  I don't see anything in tests or comments to explain it.  Our
>> guess is that it tries to put some breathing room around retries so
>> that the chance of a conflict error might be reduced.
>
> Yup, although I think it's misguided in this case.  With conflicts,
> there's always a winner, so it makes sense to try again right away.
>
>>
>> In one of our tests setting STAGGER_RETRIES to False reduced a test
>> run from almost 9 minutes to about 1 minute (see https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/launchpad-foundations/+bug/401586)
>> .  We have papered this over in our test suite to no ill effect,
>> giving speed advantages.  We wonder if we should remove the behavior
>> entirely, even in production.
>
> I think so.
>
>> 1) Why should the time.sleep go into supportsRetry rather than retry?
>> it seems really odd to have it in the method that returns a boolean,
>> rather than the one that does the work.
>
> Yup.
>
>> 2) Can someone give some background for this code?  Can they give
>> examples of it actually helping anything?
>
> I doubt it.
>
>> We'd like to improve this, minimally by adding some explanatory
>> comments, and maybe by changing, moving, or removing this code.
>
> Let's just remove it.

Cool, I'll do it tonight or tomorrow (have to run right now).  Thank  
you very much!

Gary