The auxiliary OpenAI clients were built without overriding the SDK's
default max_retries=2, so every aux call silently made up to 3 attempts
against a slow/hung endpoint — a 120s timeout could stall ~360s before
Hermes saw a single failure. On the critical compression preflight path,
Hermes then added its own same-provider timeout retry on top, roughly
doubling the user-visible stall again before fallback.
- Build both the sync (_create_openai_client) and async (_to_async_client)
aux clients with max_retries=0 (setdefault, so explicit callers still
override). Hermes already owns retry + provider/model fallback policy.
- For task == compression, skip the same-provider transient retry on a
full-budget timeout and fall straight through to fallback. Fast blips
(streaming-close, 5xx) still retry, since those are cheap.
- Add _is_timeout_error to distinguish a full-budget timeout from a fast
connection drop.
Addresses the retry-multiplication root cause of #54465 (the resume-wedge
persistence half landed in #55499).
Teknium
c8376e0dc6