Retrying Redis connection attempts keeps going to infinite when MaxRetriesPerRequestError is handled

ioredis doesn’t emit MaxRetriesPerRequestError when Redis error is down!~

ioredis ver: 4.17.3

This is not working in my production APP so I have prepared small test project to check if I am able to repeat the same and indeed I can. Code:

const Redis = require("ioredis");

function connectToRedis(redisProps) {
  const redisDefaultProps = {
    host: "127.0.0.1",
    port: "6379",
    db: 1,
    maxRetriesPerRequest: 20,
    retryStrategy(times) {
      console.warn(`Retrying redis connection: attempt ${times}`);
      return Math.min(times * 500, 2000);
    },
  };

  const g_redis = new Redis({ ...redisDefaultProps, ...redisProps });

  g_redis.on("connecting", () => {
    console.log("Connecting to Redis.");
  });
  g_redis.on("connect", () => {
    console.log("Success! Redis connection established.");
  });
  g_redis.on("error", (err) => {
    if (err.code === "ECONNREFUSED") {
      console.warn(`Could not connect to Redis: ${err.message}.`);
    } else if (err.name === "MaxRetriesPerRequestError") {
      console.error(`Critical Redis error: ${err.message}. Shutting down.`);
      process.exit(1);
    } else {
      console.error(`Redis encountered an error: ${err.message}.`);
    }
  });
}

connectToRedis();

I have tried to setup different versions of Redis and the problem appears no matter which I use. I have also tried to setup Redis on different hosts and I get the same error.

Scenario:

1. Start Redis server
2. Start the app with node index.js
3. Connection is established
4. Go to Redis server host and shutdown the Redis process with ‘kill -9 Redis_PID’ or stop the Redis service with ‘sudo systemctl stop redis’ (CentOS 7.5).
5. ioredis detects following and is starting retryStrategy described in above code:

Retrying redis connection: attempt 18
Could not connect to Redis: connect ECONNREFUSED 127.0.0.1:6379.

Bug: The strategy keeps going. No MaxRetriesPerRequestError is emitted. The app is not stopped.

Could not connect to Redis: connect ECONNREFUSED 127.0.0.1:6379.
Retrying redis connection: attempt 27

Expected behavior: retryStrategy reaches maxRetriesPerRequest limit and emits MaxRetriesPerRequestError.

[gsouf]

There is indeed something fundamentally wrong around ioredis connection.

Following this sample

    try {
        const redisClient = new Redis({
            lazyConnect: true,
            connectTimeout: 5000,
            maxRetriesPerRequest: 3,
        });
        await redisClient.connect();

    } catch (e) {
        console.log('redis connection error', e);
    }

If there is an error with the connection to the redis server then it will fall in the catch statement, then it will keep looping forever throwing unhandled errors. Making an async application looping forever. The only way to quit the app at this point is to call process.exit. That makes error management with this library very hard and unreliable.

[barbarafarias]

Any updates here? I’m facing the same issue. 😔