I’m running a Twisted web server and trying to figure out a good way to handle retries from the client. In normal operation the client makes a request of the server with some JSON data and receives a JSON response. Every request includes a header with a unique identifier.
I’m trying to handle the case where the client doesn’t receive the response (might time out) and needs to resubmit the request. Since the request can change the server state I don’t want it to reprocess if it’s already been processed.
Possible approaches:
-
What I’m thinking of is caching every JSON response and if the client
submits a request with a duplicate request ID then just return the cached
data. The thing is I’m not sure how often this situation will
actually come up in the wild and caching every response and
inspecting every request might be a lot of overhead (some responses
are quite large JSON structures). -
I could minimize much of the caching by just returning a HTTP response
that indicates it was a duplicate request, but then the client won’t know
what the original response was.
Is there a best-practice for handling duplicate requests from a server?