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When services time out, retrying immediately usually makes things worse. This post shows a better way: exponential back-off with jitter. Simple, works for one client or a thousand. Code example included.
Timeouts are not an exciting thing to talk about. They do not add immediately perceivable value. They are difficult to guess get right and force one to consider problems that are hard to solve. In fact, in my experience, the timeout is only ever considered when our software stops working or is about to. That is an enormous shame since, in my opinion, carefully applied timeouts can vastly improve software resiliency.