Retry and Backoff Strategies

This cluster centers on discussions about implementing retry mechanisms, exponential backoff, jitter, and handling transient failures in APIs and services during outages or errors. Commenters debate best practices, trade-offs like latency, and alternatives such as queues or idempotency.

➡️ Stable 0.6x DevOps & Infrastructure
2,466
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#8022
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
2
2008
9
2009
13
2010
22
2011
22
2012
73
2013
81
2014
68
2015
116
2016
118
2017
130
2018
125
2019
139
2020
205
2021
251
2022
241
2023
291
2024
266
2025
276
2026
18

Keywords

e.g TL OOM ES OK ID DR AKA github.com i.e retry exponential requests queue request fails fallback fail representation function

Sample Comments

tyingq • Apr 14, 2021 • View on HN

The page didn't mention retries, exponential back off, etc. Is there somewhere where it shows how that sort of thing is handled?

resolutebat • Oct 22, 2023 • View on HN

If only there was a simple way to exponentially limit your retries and back off a bit when the other side is constantly failing.

jmalicki • Oct 5, 2021 • View on HN

There is something inherently wrong with that - it's why exponential backoff exists.

zffr • Oct 17, 2022 • View on HN

If a client retries it’s not necessary for all 100 requests to be attempted again. The system could be designed to only repeat the unsuccessful operations.

elwell • Oct 3, 2015 • View on HN

The article mentions exponential retry periods for that.

emiliobumachar • Apr 18, 2013 • View on HN

Please share those reasons. The only one I can think of is false positives of temporarily down servers, which could be mitigated by timed retries.

Tepix • Jun 16, 2021 • View on HN

In this case it seems like a retry will change this API from "completely broken" to "working again".

mikeravkine • Jun 19, 2023 • View on HN

Errors are so common with these endpoints, not having retry out of the box just makes it harder to hack on which I think is against the spirit?

enahum • Jul 22, 2020 • View on HN

So nothing like automatic retries/backoff or queue failed requests?

whateveracct • May 17, 2021 • View on HN

aren't retry policies inherently compromising on "A"? they fail and cause things to be slow when they take effect