topic
Verified 2026-09-18Retries, Timeouts, and Backoff
Clients need explicit retry rules for network failures, timeouts, and transient HTTP responses.
Retry only when the operation is safe, idempotent, or protected by an idempotency mechanism. Use bounded exponential backoff with jitter, honor Retry-After, and use separate connection, request, and overall deadlines.
httpreliabilityretriestimeoutsapi
Reference (http)
HTTP 503 Service Unavailable Retry-After: 30
Retry only when the operation is safe, idempotent, or protected by an idempotency mechanism. Use bounded exponential backoff with jitter, honor Retry-After, and use separate connection, request, and overall deadlines.
Common mistakes
- Retrying every 4xx response, retrying a POST after an ambiguous timeout without deduplication, or allowing retries to outlive the user request.
Sources