Regarding keepalive and idempotency

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Sat, Jan 04, 2014 at 05:14:51PM +0530, Fasih wrote:

> Hi guys
> 
> Hello guys
> 
> Nginx keepalive seems to retry automatically on failure. However for
> non-idempotent requests, it is incorrect by RFC to retry automatically
> because the server could have changed its state before nginx detected the
> error.
> 
> Is this a bug that would be fixed or did I not get it right?

As of now, keepalive connection retries aren't aware of 
idempotence, much like proxy_next_upstream.  Retries are only done 
in case of early errors though, and this is expected to be good 
enought in most cases.

The future plan is to teach proxy_next_upstream and friends about 
idempotent or not idempotent methods, and probably also splitting 
"error" state into errors before we were theoretically able to 
send at least some bytes of the request (that is, retries are for 
sure safe even in case of non-idempotent methods), and errors 
after that point.

-- 
Maxim Dounin
http://nginx.org/