Posted by Edd Mann on Apr 21, 2017
Handling Retries and Back-off Attempts with JavaScript Promises
Promises are an invaluable abstraction around ‘eventual’ results within asynchronous operations. I recently had the need to be able to retry a Promise-based action in the event of a failure. It turned out to be very easy to implement such a process using simple recursive constructs.
Initially I only required the ability to retry a desired amount of times, before eventually failing if still unsuccessful. You can see how easy it was to describe this problem in Promise-form within the function below.
const retry = (retries, fn) =>
fn().catch(err => retries > 1 ? retry(retries - 1, fn) : Promise.reject(err));
However, what I eventually required was the ability to ‘back-off’ and provide an increasing grace-period between the operation attempts. Again, it was very easy to describe this within a Promise as shown below.
const pause = (duration) => new Promise(res => setTimeout(res, duration));
const backoff = (retries, fn, delay = 500) =>
fn().catch(err => retries > 1
? pause(delay).then(() => backoff(retries - 1, fn, delay * 2))
: Promise.reject(err));
As you can see, both implementations use a recursive structure with decrementing retries to hit the base-case.
What I find so impressive with the Promise abstraction is how easy it is to codify complex problems such as this with minimal code.
Demo
Below you can see a JSBin demo which uses an intentionally unreliable Promise to exercise the two functions retrying behaviour.