Glossary
Exponential backoff with jitter
A retry strategy where each attempt waits longer than the last, plus a random amount, so failing clients don’t all retry at the same moment.
Also called Retry backoff, Jitter.
In plain terms
If a service slows down and every client retries immediately, the retries become the problem. They pile on more load just when the service can least handle it.
Backoff spaces the retries out: wait 1 second, then 2, then 4. Jitter adds randomness to each wait so thousands of clients don’t retry in lockstep. A retry budget caps how many attempts are allowed at all.
See what happens without it
The failure pattern this protects against, retry amplification and runaway resource consumption, played out step by step.
Scroll the diagram sideways to see every system.
A brief slowdown has become a full outage.
What goes wrong:
- The database slows down for a moment.
- Every client times out and retries at the same moment.
- The retries time out too, and retry again, multiplying the load.
- A brief slowdown has become a full outage.
With the safeguard:
- The database slows down for a moment.
- Clients back off with random jitter and stop after a small retry budget.
- A circuit breaker sheds the excess before it reaches the database.
- The database recovers and traffic flows normally again.
When it mattered
AWS’s published guidance on timeouts and retries explains why retries without backoff and jitter amplify overload, and recommends capping them.