Feature request: Allow retry attempts on timed out URLs

[kaushalmodi]

Hello,

I have been using htmltest to qualify deployment of one of my site. But recently almost every time, I get false failures like:

3:36:37 PM: www.xianmin.org on 10.23.240.10:53: read udp 10.21.62.244:57717->10.23.240.10:53: i/o timeout --- doc/examples/index.html --> https://www.xianmin.org/

and then when I visit that link myself, it works.

I deploy my site over Netlify and may be due to network loads or something, the timeouts happen almost every time.

I even increased the external timeout param from 15 (default) to 30 seconds. But that didn't help either.

So a feature request..

• Can you add a configurable repeat attempt parameter that retries pinging a URL if it times out? I would like to set this param to 3 (default=1). To add to that, may be you can add up the user-set external timer on each attempt.

So..

• attempt 1, externaltimeout = 15 (default) = X
• attempt 2, externaltimeout = 30 = 2X
• attempt 3, externaltimeout = 45 = 3X
• and so on.

For now, I restart the Netlify deploy and the false error doesn't happen again.. but that adds a bit of inconvenience.. to restart the deploy + wait another 4 or so minutes (first world problems).

[wjdp]

Makes a lot of sense, I like!

[alexppg]

Also it could be used with some webpages that are on flaky servers and have some requests just fail for whatever reason, even if most of them usually work.