Retry with Backoff Pattern

What problem does it solve?

Transient failures in distributed systems often cause errors that recover by retrying, but naive retries can overwhelm services or cause cascading failures.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Exponential backoff: delays grow between retries to reduce load on failing services.
• Optional jitter: adds randomness to prevent thundering herd scenarios.
• Configurable policies: max attempts, initial and max delay, and backoff multiplier.
• Error classification: distinguish transient vs permanent errors to avoid unnecessary retries.
• Use cases include retrying HTTP requests, queue operations, and database calls after temporary outages.

Quick Start

Create a retry helper with exponential backoff for your API calls and use it to wrap your network requests.