7.31Exponential backoff

You may hear:

retry with exponential backoff

Instead of:

1 sec
1 sec
1 sec
1 sec

you do something conceptually like:

1 sec
2 sec
4 sec
8 sec

Often with jitter.

Why?

If a service has an outage and 500 workers retry simultaneously every second:

thundering herd

can worsen the outage.

You don't need to prove Mule syntax for exponential backoff during this interview. Understand the resilience concept.