Architecture

Backoff

Wait longer between retries after each failure.

In plain terms

Exponential, jittered, decorrelated. Without jitter, all clients retry at exactly the same moment — the thundering herd that crashes a recovering service.

Origin

Exponential backoff dates to Metcalfe & Boggs's Ethernet paper (1976). Jittered backoff popularised by AWS's 2015 builders' library post.

Where it shows up in production

TCP retransmission timer Exponential backoff is built into TCP since the 1980s.
Every cloud SDK AWS, GCP, Azure SDKs use jittered exponential backoff on 5xx / 429 responses.

On Semicolony

Simulator retry strategy

Sources & further reading

Blog AWS — Exponential Backoff and Jitter
Docs Retry strategy simulator (Semicolony)

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