Publish RetryAttempt and RetryWait not working as expected

[sourabhaggrawal]

Observed behavior

js.Publish("test", []byte("hi"), nats.RetryWait(5*time.Second), nats.RetryAttempts(10))
It gives up at first attempt itself after waiting for 5 second.

Expected behavior

This supposed to retry 10 times if there is "no responder" error and should retry 5 times before it gives up. So after 50 seconds it should give up if there is "no responder" error on every attempt.

Server and client version

nats-server 2.10.3
nats-client 1.35.0

Host environment

Mac OS

Steps to reproduce

Publish a message to subject which is not associated to stream, configure retry attempt and retrywait.

js.Publish("test", []byte("hi"), nats.RetryWait(5*time.Second), nats.RetryAttempts(10))

[souravagrawal]

Raised a PR for same here #1667

[Jarema]

The current bahavior is restrained by TTL that can be set by nats.AckWait().
The number of retries defines the upper bound for number of retries. TTL still applies.

[souravagrawal]

Any specific reason why it only retries in case of "No Responder" case. There can be many other cases too where user expect nats to retry publish.
Also this retry is not there in AsyncPublish method of go, however it is there in .net client https://github.com/nats-io/nats.net.v2/blob/ccc212f764508f11a3154ade8d29bfdbb772de02/src/NATS.Client.JetStream/NatsJSContext.cs#L120

[Jarema]

Only retrying on no responders is safe.
Retrying on Timeout can lead to duplicate messages in the stream, as the operation can finish after client timeout window.

.net async publish is a publish that waits for the ack. The async part comes from the idiom in .net, meaning that it's async operation from .net perspective, not NATS idioms perspective.

We're trying to find a better name for async publish, meaning - a publish that does not wait for ack, but returnes a future of a kind ;).

[souravagrawal]

What are your thoughts on providing Retry Attempts in Async Publish ?

[sourabhaggrawal]

@Jarema Currently async publish does not support retry, is there any plan to fix/add later.

[Jarema]

@sourabhaggrawal at least the new jetstream package does support retries on async publish. Not sure about the legacy one.
Will defer that one to @piotrpio

[sourabhaggrawal]

Great, can you share some example for async Publish using new jetstream api ?
TIA

[piotrpio]

Hello @sourabhaggrawal, sorry for taking so long with this. Please see my reply here for an example using new JetStream API.

We'll also be adding the retries to the old API, but I'm not yet sure it'll make it to the next release.