What is a retry storm?

Definition

Retry storms begin when callers respond to errors by trying again too quickly or without a shared limit. The added traffic delays recovery, creates more timeouts and can spread failure to other services or agent tasks.

Prevention combines exponential backoff, jitter, circuit breakers, concurrency limits and a maximum retry budget. Agent systems should also distinguish uncertain completion from confirmed failure so retries do not duplicate side effects.

Frequently asked questions

How can an agent cause a retry storm?

It can repeatedly call a failing tool across many turns or parallel tasks without adequate delays, limits or circuit breaking.

How is a retry storm prevented?

Use bounded retries, exponential backoff with jitter, circuit breakers, concurrency limits and idempotent operations.

Videos explaining retry storm