Definition
Exponential Backoff
Retry strategy that doubles wait time after each failure. Prevents thundering herd while keeping recovery fast.
definitionreliabilitydistributed-systems
Retry strategy that doubles wait time after each failure. Prevents thundering herd while keeping recovery fast.
Exponential backoff doubles the wait interval after each consecutive failure: 5s, 10s, 20s, 40s. This prevents a crashed service from hammering a dependency with retries while still recovering quickly from transient errors. The multi-process coordinator uses it for ATS worker restarts (5s/10s/30s/60s cap) so a LinkedIn crash does not cascade into a retry storm that triggers detection.