Jitter

You absolutely never let an application reconnect instantly.

Developers use a mechanism called exponential backoff with full jitter.

I understand the backoff part.

You know, you tell the client to wait two seconds, then four seconds, then eight seconds.

But what does full jitter actually mean?

Jitter introduces randomness.

If you just use exponential backoff and 200,000 clients all wait exactly two seconds, well, they just form a new stampede two seconds later.

Yeah, I love this because as network engineers listen to this episode, they could go back to the user, to application developer.

Usually it's the other way around, right? The application developer are telling a network engineer, oh, this is HiLincy, this is Jitter, we can't do this.

But now the network engineers could go back and say, well, have you thought about...

That's great.