[BUG]: Increase timeout duration during retries

[ruslan-sm]

What happened?

gh copilot explain "mysqldump --single-transaction --compact --column-statistics=0 --set-gtid-purged=OFF --skip-comments --no-create-db --no-create-info --databases test --tables operator country service message -h de.test.com -u itopr_viewer -p -P3306 > dump-test.sql && sed -i '1s/^/SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;\n/' dump-test.sql && sed -i 's/INSERT INTO/INSERT IGNORE INTO/g' dump-test.sql"

Versions

gh version 2.42.1 (2024-01-16)
version 0.5.4-beta (2024-01-04)

Relevant terminal output

✗ Error: failed to explain: failed to create explain message: error sending request: error making request: Post "https://api.githubcopilot.com/github/chat/threads/...../messages": net/http: request canceled (Client.Timeout exceeded while awaiting headers)

[andyfeller]

@ruslan-sm : thank you for opening this issue and apologies for delayed follow up! 🙇 Let me try to explain — no pun intended — what I believe was happening at the time and then we can talk about what is done and should be when there are server side timeouts.

Firstly, that is quite command 👏 which I promise does get explained:

$ ghce "mysqldump --single-transaction --compact --column-statistics=0 --set-gtid-purged=PFF --skip-comments --no-create-db --no-create-info --databases test --tables operator country service message -h de.test.com -u itopr_viewer -p -P3306 > dump-test.sql && sed -i '1s/^/SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;\n/' dump-test.sql && sed -i 's/INSERT INTO/INSERT IGNORE INTO/g' dump-test.sql"

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Explanation:                                                                                                                                                                                                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                    
  • mysqldump is used to create a backup of MySQL databases.                                                                                                                                                        
    • --single-transaction ensures that the dump is consistent by using a single transaction.                                                                                                                       
    • --compact produces a more compact dump format.                                                                                                                                                                
    • --column-statistics=0 disables column statistics gathering.                                                                                                                                                   
    • --set-gtid-purged=PFF sets the GTID purged value.                                                                                                                                                             
    • --skip-comments skips adding comments to the dump file.                                                                                                                                                       
    • --no-create-db excludes the CREATE DATABASE statements from the dump.                                                                                                                                         
    • --no-create-info excludes the CREATE TABLE statements from the dump.                                                                                                                                          
    • --databases test specifies the databases to include in the dump.                                                                                                                                              
    • --tables operator country service message specifies the tables to include in the dump.                                                                                                                        
    • -h de.test.com specifies the MySQL server host.                                                                                                                                                               
    • -u itopr_viewer specifies the MySQL username.                                                                                                                                                                 
    • -p prompts for the MySQL password.                                                                                                                                                                            
    • -P3306 specifies the MySQL server port.                                                                                                                                                                       
    • > dump-test.sql redirects the output of the mysqldump command to a file called dump-test.sql.                                                                                                                 
  • && is used to execute the next command only if the previous command succeeds.                                                                                                                                   
  • sed -i '1s/^/SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;\n/' dump-test.sql uses sed to insert SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0; at the beginning of the dump-test.sql file.                                                               
  • sed -i 's/INSERT INTO/INSERT IGNORE INTO/g' dump-test.sql uses sed to replace all occurrences of INSERT INTO with INSERT IGNORE INTO in the dump-test.sql file.  

Why was there a timeout exceeded?

Shortly before you reported this error, GitHub Copilot in the CLI was unintentionally switched from GPT 3.5 to GPT 4. While this is a more detailed model that allows larger number of tokens in prompts, it also results in nearly doubling the request time to fulfill prompts.

In addition, GitHub Copilot in the CLI has some built-in handling of retries based on responses provided by Copilot API, however the timeout does not exponentially backed off.

What can we do?

For the purposes of retries, I think client timeout needs to increase as a precaution to hopefully avoid issues like this. As I mentioned, there is a small number of retries to avoid stampeding herd issues.