API Retries and Exponential Back-offs

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Author:

Fluent Commerce

Changed on:

5 July 2024

Overview

Exponential backoff is a standard error handling policy for network communications such as the Fluent APIs.

Exponential backoff involves a client periodically retrying a failed request over an increasing amount of time.

Key points

Retries & Exponential Back-offs

For operations that create or update data, a check is recommended before retrying the API call to avoid unnecessary duplication.

Note

For example:

Order post fails with 500 Check if the order exists Retry after 1 second If still failing, retry after 10 seconds *If still failing, retry after 5 minutes

This is the recommended approach when dealing with server-side or network-related errors.

Warning

This approach is not recommended for client-side errors including authentication or invalid data (i.e. 300- and 400-level errors). These will always return the same error regardless of the retry or time delay.