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Retry PolicyDoc

A compact reference card for designing retry policies in distributed systems. Covers backoff strategies, jitter, circuit breakers, and idempotency guards.

Quick Reference

  • Max retries: 3–5 for transient failures; fail fast on 4xx client errors.
  • Backoff: exponential with full jitter — sleep = rand(0, base * 2^n).
  • Circuit breaker: open after 5 consecutive failures; half-open probe after 30s.
  • Idempotency: attachIdempotency-Key header; deduplicate server-side for at-least-once safety.

Anti-Patterns

  • • Retrying non-idempotent writes without dedup.
  • • Fixed-delay retries causing thundering herds.
  • • Infinite retry loops with no deadline.
  • • Retrying on 400 Bad Request or 401 Unauthorized.
Last updated: 2026-05-26 · Meridian Docs