Backoff

Definitions

1. A retry strategy where the delay between attempts increases (typically exponentially) after each failure. Prevents overwhelming a recovering service with a flood of retries. Often combined with jitter (random delay) to avoid thundering herd problems.

   In plain English: Waiting longer and longer between retry attempts when something fails, to give the system time to recover.

   Example: "Add exponential backoff with jitter to your API client — without it, all clients retry simultaneously and DDoS the service."

Related Terms

• Webhook vs. Polling
• Event-Driven Architecture
• Chaos Engineering
• Service Mesh
• Circuit Breaker
• Load Shedding
• Backpressure
• Retry Policy
• Timeout