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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Better Error recovery
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
I got a complaint about BottomFeeder's handling of network errors yesterday - specifically, the way it deals with getting timeouts from all (or most) of the feeds during an update cycle. The way it handled this before was to just ignore it, treating it as (yet another) transient network issue. However, some kinds of ISP issues can make this a painful choice - say your system acts like it has network connectivity, but all http requests yield timeouts. Given the time for any particular request to timeout, this can yield a very unresponsive application.
What I've done is added a counter - if 10% or more of your feeds are failing with timeouts, then the update process will be suspended, and you'll get prompted for what to do - ignore the errors and push on, or go offline. I also added a setting that allows the old behavior (just completely ignoring the timeouts) to take place - I often get transient errors that come and go, and I'd just as soon let them pass. The way Bf is now set up, that decision is up to you as the user
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