exponential backoff
Retry strategy where each successive attempt waits exponentially longer — the standard response to rate-limit and 5xx errors.
Definition
Exponential backoff is a retry strategy where the delay between attempts grows exponentially (1s, 2s, 4s, 8s) usually with a random jitter to avoid thundering-herd retries. It is the canonical way to handle 429 Too Many Requests, 503 Service Unavailable, and transient network errors. Most production HTTP clients and SDKs ship backoff with sensible defaults.
When to use
See also
- rate limit — A cap on how many requests a client can make to an API per unit of time, after which further calls are rejected.
- idempotency — A property of an operation where calling it twice has the same effect as calling it once.