silly me, we were overriding retries in the aqt monkeypatch

anki/sync.py

@@ -20,7 +20,7 @@ import anki
 HTTP_TIMEOUT = 90
 HTTP_PROXY = None
 
-# badly named; means no retries, and doesn't affect ssl connections
+# badly named; means no retries
 httplib2.RETRIES = 1
 
 try:

aqt/sync.py

@@ -447,7 +447,7 @@ httplib.HTTPConnection.send = _incrementalSend
 
 # receiving in httplib2
 def _conn_request(self, conn, request_uri, method, body, headers):
-    for i in range(2):
+    for i in range(httplib2.RETRIES):
         try:
             if conn.sock is None:
               conn.connect()