Retry Mechanism Fails When Redis Container is Paused

[ManelCoutinhoSensei]

Expected behavior

When the Redis container is paused (not stopped), the connection attempt should fail, triggering the retry mechanism. The retry number should increase monotonically until until the specified maximum number of retries is reached.

Example logs of expected behavior:

INFO - Attempt 1/5. Backing off for 0.5 seconds
INFO - Attempt 2/5. Backing off for 1.0 seconds
INFO - Attempt 3/5. Backing off for 2.0 seconds
INFO - Attempt 4/5. Backing off for 4.0 seconds

The print statement was added at the end of the following except block:

redis-py/redis/retry.py

Lines 60 to 70 in ea01a30

	while True:
	try:
	return do()
	except self._supported_errors as error:
	failures += 1
	fail(error)
	if self._retries >= 0 and failures > self._retries:
	raise error
	backoff = self._backoff.compute(failures)
	if backoff > 0:
	sleep(backoff)

Actual behavior

Instead of progressing through the retry attempts, the retry mechanism gets stuck at the first attempt, repeating indefinitely.

Example logs of actual behavior:

INFO - Attempt 1/5. Backing off for 0.5 seconds
INFO - Attempt 1/5. Backing off for 0.5 seconds
INFO - Attempt 1/5. Backing off for 0.5 seconds
INFO - Attempt 1/5. Backing off for 0.5 seconds

Root Cause

The issue occurs because the sock.connect (line 575 of the _connect method) succeeds even when the container is paused. However, subsequent read operations fail with Timeout.

redis-py/redis/connection.py

Lines 728 to 763 in ea01a30

	def _connect(self):
	"Create a TCP socket connection"
	# we want to mimic what socket.create_connection does to support
	# ipv4/ipv6, but we want to set options prior to calling
	# socket.connect()
	err = None
	for res in socket.getaddrinfo(
	self.host, self.port, self.socket_type, socket.SOCK_STREAM
	):
	family, socktype, proto, canonname, socket_address = res
	sock = None
	try:
	sock = socket.socket(family, socktype, proto)
	# TCP_NODELAY
	sock.setsockopt(socket.IPPROTO_TCP, socket.TCP_NODELAY, 1)
	# TCP_KEEPALIVE
	if self.socket_keepalive:
	sock.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_KEEPALIVE, 1)
	for k, v in self.socket_keepalive_options.items():
	sock.setsockopt(socket.IPPROTO_TCP, k, v)
	# set the socket_connect_timeout before we connect
	sock.settimeout(self.socket_connect_timeout)
	# connect
	sock.connect(socket_address)
	# set the socket_timeout now that we're connected
	sock.settimeout(self.socket_timeout)
	return sock
	except OSError as _:
	err = _
	if sock is not None:
	sock.close()

Possible solution

To properly detect when the connection is truly established, we can send a PING command immediately after connect() and verify the response.
Add the following after sock.connect() to ensure the connection is functional:

ping_parts = self._command_packer.pack("PING")
for part in ping_parts:
    sock.sendall(part)

    response = sock.recv(7)

    if not str_if_bytes(response).startswith("+PONG"):
        raise OSError(f"Redis handshake failed: unexpected response {response!r}")

Additional Comments

• There may be a better way to handle the read operation for the PING response using existing methods, but calling _send_ping directly does not work in this case.

• This issue also affects the asynchronous version of redis-py.

---

Let me know if you'd like a clearer example to reproduce the behavior.

[vladvildanov]

Hi! We would have a look on this in meantime

[ManelCoutinhoSensei]

Following up on this issue, I've noticed that it also occurs when a container is still booting up in the background, making the port available before the Redis instance has fully initialized.

An improved approach for my Proposed solution would look like this:

try:
    ping_parts = self._command_packer.pack("PING")
    for part in ping_parts:
        sock.sendall(part)

    response = sock.recv(7)
    assert str_if_bytes(response).startswith("+PONG")
except Exception:
    raise OSError(f"Redis handshake failed: {socket_address}")

However, there are two small points that require consideration:

1. I'm not entirely sure about the most appropriate error type to raise here. Using OSError might compel users to explicitly handle this exception in their retry logic (which might not be ideal for the async case where the retry says that supported errors should be of type Tuple[Type[RedisError], ...]).
2. Although performing this PING check by default seems beneficial, it might be valuable to include a flag allowing users to disable this behavior, especially in scenarios where each message incurs a cost (similar to how the library currently handles setting lib name/version by default but allows disabling it—see lines 509–516).

[ManelCoutinhoSensei]

Hey @vladvildanov , I opened a PR with a solution to problem mentioned in the comment. if you want I can add you as a reviewer