Best Attestation Data strategy - exit hard timeout loop immediately upon receiving the first response

[oleg-ssvlabs]

Description
I was reviewing how soft and hard timeouts work in the Best Attestation Data strategy and noticed a potential improvement in the flow.

From my understanding, the current behavior is as follows:

• When the soft timeout is reached: If at least one response is received, the hard timeout loop will not be entered. This means that the first available response will be returned from the AttestationData() method. This suggests that the application considers a single response sufficient and it is not worth to wait for additional responses(time is the price to pay) that could improve response quality evaluation and selection of the best one.
• When the soft timeout is reached and no response is received: The application enters the hard timeout loop. However, once the first response is received, the application does not immediately exit the loop. Instead, it continues waiting until the hard timeout is reached or all responses/errors have been collected.

Proposed Improvement
When the application enters the hard timeout loop and at least one response is received, it should immediately exit the loop rather than waiting for all responses/errors or hard timeout. I think it aligns better with the implementation logic.

Please let me know if I understood the flow correctly.
Thank you

[mcdee]

Your reading of the strategy is correct. The operation is intentional: a strategy such as "best" assumes that there are multiple nodes that are either "near/fast" or "far/slow". It expects "near" nodes to respond well within the soft timeout, and in normal operation the strategy will select the best option from these nodes. If these nodes are unavailable, then it falls to the "far" nodes to respond and these will be after the soft timeout. But we do not want the "best" strategy to become the "first" strategy, unless there is only one node that responds with the data. Hence if there have been no responses up to the soft timeout the "best" strategy will continue to wait for multiple responses (if possible) to confirm it has the best available data.