System Design · Senior · Question 62 of 75

After a WebSocket server outage, all clients reconnect at once and knock it over again. How do you prevent this?

✓Correct answer: Reconnect with exponential backoff and random jitter, and let servers reject excess connections gracefully
2Reconnect every 100 ms until it works
3Never reconnect automatically

Explanation

It's a thundering herd. Spreading reconnects over time lets the service recover.

Further reading

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