Exponential Backoff and Jitter

Brooker, M. (2015). Exponential Backoff and Jitter. AWS Architecture Blog.

Type

Web resource

Intellectual base

Web

Year

2015

Link

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/exponential-backoff-and-jitter/

Cited from

computer_science

Cited by

3 citations across 3 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Thundering Herd
  • The canonical fix is to spread the release window: replacing a synchronous release with one jittered uniformly over \([0, W]\) for \(W \gg \delta\) reduces the peak rate to \(n / W\), recovering the independence the queueing bound assumed.

    This sourceEstablishes jitter (randomized backoff over a release window) as the canonical de-synchronization remedy for correlated retries, explicitly addressing the thundering-herd problem in which synchronized client retries spike load.

Mechanisms

• Batch Job Staggering
  • Its failure mode is the synchronized retry storm: if staggered jobs fail and all retry on the same fixed backoff, they re-synchronize into a fresh spike worse than the original — the classic thundering herd, where many clients wake and contend for one resource at once.

    This sourceDemonstrates the contention created when many clients start together and try to update the same database row.

• Randomized Polling Offset
  • And adding an offset

    This sourceShows that adding randomized jitter spreads otherwise clustered client retries.

Verification

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