Please use the following questions as a guideline to help me answer
your issue/question without further inquiry. Thank you.

Which version of Elastic are you using?

• elastic.v7 (for Elasticsearch 7.x)
• elastic.v6 (for Elasticsearch 6.x)
• elastic.v5 (for Elasticsearch 5.x)
• elastic.v3 (for Elasticsearch 2.x)
• elastic.v2 (for Elasticsearch 1.x)

Please describe the expected behavior

This issue is similar to #1247 but with a bigger scope.

When an individual request fails in a bulk processor, it should not retry when the backoff returns false.

Please describe the actual behavior

When the backoff returns false and there is an error in the individual request , the failing request is added back to the bulkprocessor before the commit function returns. This causes the indefinite retries.

The following code in bulk_processor.go is responsible for this behaviour.

// commitFunc will commit bulk requests and, on failure, be retried
// via exponential backoff
commitFunc := func() error {
    var err error
    // Save requests because they will be reset in service.Do
    reqs := w.service.requests
    res, err = w.service.Do(ctx)
    if err == nil {
	// Overall bulk request was OK.  But each bulk response item also has a status
	if w.p.retryItemStatusCodes != nil && len(w.p.retryItemStatusCodes) > 0 {
		// Check res.Items since some might be soft failures
	    if res.Items != nil && res.Errors {
		// res.Items will be 1 to 1 with reqs in same order
		for i, item := range res.Items {
		    for _, result := range item {
	                if _, found := w.p.retryItemStatusCodes[result.Status]; found {
			    w.service.Add(reqs[i]) //here the failing request is added back to the processor regardless of the backoff flag
			    if err == nil {
				err = ErrBulkItemRetry
	                     }
			}
	            }
		}
	    }
        }
    }
    return err
}

Any steps to reproduce the behavior?

One easy way to recreate this is to retry on client side errors, and send wrong data type to a field in the index.