Retries in restic try to solve two main problems:
- retry a temporarily failed operation
- tolerate temporary network interruptions
The first problem only requires a few retries, whereas the last one benefits
primarily from spreading the requests over a longer duration.
Increasing the default multiplier and the initial interval works for
both cases. The first few retries only take a few seconds, while later
retries quickly reach the maximum interval of one minute. This ensures
that the total number of retries issued by restic will remain at around
21 retries for a 15 minute period. As the concurrency in restic is
bounded, retries drastically reduce the number of requests sent to a
backend. This helps to prevent overloading the backend.
Previously, if an operation failed after 15 minutes, then it would never
be retried. This means that large backend requests are more unreliable
than smaller ones.
Depending on how long an operation takes to fail, the total retry
duration can currently vary between 1.5 and 15 minutes. In particular
for temporarily interrupted network connections, the former timeout is
too short. Thus always use a limit of 15 minutes.
If a file exhausts its retry attempts, then it is likely not accessible
the next time. Thus, immediately fail all load calls for that file to
avoid useless retries.
The Test method was only used in exactly one place, namely when trying
to create a new repository it was used to check whether a config file
already exists.
Use a combination of Stat() and IsNotExist() instead.
The ioutil functions are deprecated since Go 1.17 and only wrap another
library function. Thus directly call the underlying function.
This commit only mechanically replaces the function calls.
The RetryBackend tests depend on the mock backend. When the Backend
interface is eventually split from the restic package, this will lead to
a dependency cycle between backend and backend/mock. Thus split the
RetryBackend into a separate package to avoid this problem.
