jargon

Comparison

Exponential backoffvsTimeout

Exponential backoff

you retry the failed call, wait twice as long, retry again, and add a little randomness so your whole fleet does not retry in lockstep.

The standard retry strategy: on failure, wait, then retry with doubling delays plus jitter. Combined with a retry budget it handles rate limits and transient errors. You have written this before; it applies unchanged.

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Timeout

you give up on the call after two seconds instead of holding the thread open until the other side eventually answers or does not.

A bound on how long you will wait for an operation. It is the most under-set value in most codebases: many clients default to no timeout at all, which converts a slow dependency into an exhausted connection pool and a full outage. Every network call needs one, and it should be smaller than the caller's own deadline.

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