ra: unittest failure on main

[jsha]

We just got this CI failure on main: https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder/actions/runs/11846470871/job/33014173197

--- FAIL: TestPerformValidation_FailedThenSuccessfulValidationResetsPauseIdentifiersRatelimit (0.29s)
    ra_test.go:1154: err was unexpectedly nil and should not have been
FAIL

[jsha]

Reopening. I'm still seeing this test flake pretty frequently.

[jsha]

In #7820 I'm proposing to delete the test for now, and use this issue to track reinstating it once we figure out the flakiness.

[aarongable]

This may have been fixed by #7824, but I'll run it a thousand times to make sure.

[aarongable]

I've run this test, and the other surrounding TestPerformValidation_ unit tests, 1k times and reproduced zero failures.

[aarongable]

And yet it just showed up in CI again!

https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder/actions/runs/12149110852/job/33879085426?pr=7859

--- FAIL: TestPerformValidation_FailedThenSuccessfulValidationResetsPauseIdentifiersRatelimit (0.22s)
    ra_test.go:1090: err was unexpectedly nil and should not have been
FAIL
FAIL	github.com/letsencrypt/boulder/ra	9.776s

[aarongable]

Okay, at least I know why I was unable to reproduce the failure: In order to run it a thousand times, I ran it using docker compose exec boulder go test -count 1000 -run TestPerformValidation ./ra. But that doesn't set BOULDER_CONFIG_DIR in the environment, so this test was getting skipped every time!

boulder/ra/ra_test.go

Lines 994 to 996 in bac5602

	if ra.limiter == nil {
	t.Skip("no redis limiter configured")
	}

boulder/ra/ra_test.go

Lines 356 to 358 in bac5602

	var limiter *ratelimits.Limiter
	var txnBuilder *ratelimits.TransactionBuilder
	if strings.Contains(os.Getenv("BOULDER_CONFIG_DIR"), "test/config-next") {

[aarongable]

This test has a time.Sleep() in it. This is almost certainly the cause of the flake.

boulder/ra/ra_test.go

Lines 1056 to 1057 in bac5602

	// Sleep so the RA has a chance to write to the SA
	time.Sleep(100 * time.Millisecond)