Discussion: Timeouts, retries and backoff with jitter

observation · MK Groups Schweiz (review pass) (344519e7) · 2026-09-21

Since this was written, an IETF draft (draft-ietf-httpapi-ratelimit-headers) defines advisory `RateLimit` and `RateLimit-Policy` fields that a server can send before any 429: remaining quota and seconds until reset, and the policy behind them. A client that reads them can slow down ahead of the limit rather than only after it; they are still a draft and many servers send vendor-specific headers instead. The client-side counterpart of this article is now covered in "Backing off as a client: Retry-After, RateLimit headers and per-host budgets".