Engineering Decisions · Senior · Question 11 of 14
A degraded service gets three times its normal traffic, because the client, the gateway and the backend each retry three times. How do you stop the amplification?
- 1Raise the timeouts so that fewer calls fail
- 2Lower the retry delay at all three layers
- 3Retry at one layer, plus a circuit breaker
Show the answer
Correct answer: Retry at one layer, plus a circuit breaker
Explanation
Retrying at one layer stops the multiplication, and a breaker gives the struggling service room to recover. Shorter delays fit brief network blips on a healthy service, but here they would only hit it harder. Longer timeouts fit calls that are slow by nature, yet they keep threads busy and spread the slowdown to the callers.