Making HTTPLoader more forgiving to 'intermittent' errors

[riksagar]

Hi,
I'm seeing an issue where 502/504 errors returned by our backend are causing playback to fail.

Seems HTTPLoader/FragmentLoader pretty much assumes any non-2xx HTTP response is fatal and pretty quickly blacklists the source URL.

My experience at the moment is that our cloud provider is returning 502 and 504 errors for several seconds. But it then recovers.

I'm thinking of two changes in DASH-JS to make it more tolerant to this real-world scenario:

1. More retries when status codes suggest an intermittent issue on the server (possibly with an extended short delay before retry?)
2. Don't blacklist the serviceLocation in blacklistController if there was only one entry in the list

Just wanted to get some feedback and see if anyone else had similar experience.

Regards,
Rik.

[dsilhavy]

Thanks for starting this discussion. I agree that the blacklisting is very aggressive. I think it was implemented against the DVB DASH specification a while ago. I have not checked it in detail myself but the DVB DASH spec might be worth a look.

Regarding the retry logic we do have certain settings in place. in Settings.js retryIntervals and retryAttempts.
There is some synergy with this ticket: #3334

Are you planing to do a contribution to dash.js?

[davemevans]

Related (very) old discussions:
#651
#2539