- From: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
- Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2011 10:03:05 -0400
- To: Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
- Cc: Andy Seaborne <andy.seaborne@epimorphics.com>, "<public-lod@w3.org>" <public-lod@w3.org>
On Wed, 2011-04-27 at 09:14 +0000, Hugh Glaser wrote: . . . > 5xx is the server can't do what you want, and there isn't much point > in the client having another go with the same request. > However, as you say, it may be that the server could perform the > request at another time. The "Retry-After" response-header field may be helpful in this case: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.37 [[ The Retry-After response-header field can be used with a 503 (Service Unavailable) response to indicate how long the service is expected to be unavailable to the requesting client. ]] If the server is overloaded, it is unlikely to know how long it will be overloaded, but it could still use this header to indicate that it does expect to be available at *some* point, and take a guess at when it will be, based on its past availability. For example, as a simple heuristic, if the server has been overloaded for the past n seconds, then it might return a Retry-After header of n seconds. -- David Booth, Ph.D. http://dbooth.org/ Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.
Received on Wednesday, 27 April 2011 14:03:31 UTC