Backoff strategy

I’ve never wondered how is it called when you attempt to call a server, and this fails and then you attempt two seconds later and it fails, and then 4 seconds later and then 8 and so on. Clearly it is exponential in nature, but never had much thought of “exponential what”.

Turns out this is called a backoff strategy. You get to back off.

Once we have a name we have a power over it. We can build a class or a method that is properly called backoff strategy.

And of course, as everything else there is a “javascript framework” for back off strategies – https://github.com/kenyipp/backoff-strategies. Yes, there is a javascript framework for everything… 😀

There is also a wikipedia article on the subject – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_backoff

Good. Learned something today. Now I can explain it, because I have a name and I have power over it.