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
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#8022
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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