Agent Ops / Standard term
Exponential backoff
Exponential backoff is a retry strategy where an agent waits longer after each failed attempt, doubling the delay and adding a little randomness, so a strained service gets room to recover instead of being hit by every client retrying at once.
Exponential backoff is a retry strategy where an agent waits longer after each failed attempt, doubling the delay and adding a little randomness, so a strained service gets room to recover instead of being hit by every client retrying at once. Say your agent calls an email service and the request fails. Instead of retrying immediately and again and again, it waits one second, then two, then four, then eight, with a small random jitter added to each wait so many agents do not all retry on the same beat. The growing gaps give the service time to clear its backlog, and the jitter spreads the retries out so they do not arrive in one synchronized wave.
Builder example
When you tell an agent to keep working through a flaky connection, naive retries make the problem worse: a service that is briefly overloaded gets pounded by instant retries from every agent at once, which keeps it down longer. If your agent sends fifty messages and the provider stutters, fixed one-second retries can pile on and stall the whole run. Ask your agent to retry with exponential backoff and jitter, and to give up after a set number of attempts so a permanent outage does not loop forever.
Common confusion: Retrying and exponential backoff are not the same move. A plain retry tries again right away and can flood a struggling service; exponential backoff stretches the gap between attempts and adds randomness so the load eases and recovery has room.