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How do you implement retries with exponential backoff and jitter?

Q: How do you implement retries with exponential backoff and jitter?

**TL;DR.** Retry **transient** failures with **increasing delays** ( base * 2^attempt ) up to a cap, plus **random jitter** so many clients don't retry in lockstep and re-overload the recovering service. Only retry **idempotent/safe** operations, bound the attempt count, and respect Retry-After headers. ~1s ~2s ~4s±

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Retrying transient failures without thundering herds.

nodejsresilienceretriesbackoff

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Retry with capped backoff + jitter

async function withRetry(fn, { tries = 5, base = 200, cap = 5000 } = {}) {
  for (let attempt = 0; ; attempt++) {
    try { return await fn(); }
    catch (err) {
      if (attempt >= tries - 1 || !isTransient(err)) throw err;
      const backoff = Math.min(cap, base * 2 ** attempt);
      const delay = Math.random() * backoff;        // full jitter
      await new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, delay));
    }
  }
}

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