Visualization of backoff functions

Failures are inevitable in any system. How it should be handled varies from one system to another. In job processing systems, a common approach is to retry the failed jobs for a fixed number of times before they are considered as permanent failures. A backoff function is used to determine the wait time between successive retries.

Let’s look at a simple backoff function, which retries after a fixed wait time – 5 minutes in this case.

function constant(retryCount) {
   return 5 * 60;
}

Let’s assume there are 100 job failures, the chart below shows when each of the jobs would be retried again. Each dot represents a time at which a job is retried. The color is varied based on the retry count.

An exponential backoff function increases the wait time exponentially for each retry.

function exponential(retryCount) {
    var min = 3 * 60;
    var base = 2;
    return min + (Math.pow(base, retryCount) * 60);
}

The above two are pure functions, given an input they will always return the same output. If n jobs failed at the same time, then all the n jobs will be retried at the same time, which could cause thundering herd problem. A random component called jitter is normally added to fix this problem. The last component in the function below is a random jitter that is scaled based on the retry count.

function sidekiq(retryCount) {
    return Math.pow(retryCount, 4) + 15 +
        (Math.random() * 30 * (retryCount + 1));
}

The above function is good enough for most of the use cases. There are still some gaps where your job processing system would be idle. The below function tries to distribute the load evenly by increasing the randomness.

function between(a, b) {
    return a + (Math.random() * (b - a));
}
function buckets(retryCount) {
    var exp = 3;
    return between(Math.pow(retryCount, exp),
                   Math.pow(retryCount + 2, exp));
}

Although the load distribution is better than the previous version, the wait time between two retries starts to deviate a lot. I wonder if there are any stateless functions which could provide better distribution without much deviation in wait time.

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