ruby 29 lines · 7 steps

Exponential backoff retries in Ruby

A reusable module that retries a block on transient network errors with exponentially growing, jittered delays.

Explained by highlit
Intermediate retry-logic exponential-backoff error-handling jitter resilience
1module Retryable
2 class RetriesExhausted < StandardError; end
3 
4 RETRYABLE_ERRORS = [
5 Net::OpenTimeout,
6 Net::ReadTimeout,
7 Errno::ECONNRESET,
8 Errno::ECONNREFUSED,
9 SocketError
10 ].freeze
11 
12 def self.with_backoff(max_attempts: 5, base_delay: 0.5, max_delay: 30.0, jitter: true)
13 attempt = 0
14 
15 begin
16 attempt += 1
17 yield(attempt)
18 rescue *RETRYABLE_ERRORS => error
19 raise RetriesExhausted, "gave up after #{attempt} attempts: #{error.message}" if attempt >= max_attempts
20 
21 delay = [base_delay * (2**(attempt - 1)), max_delay].min
22 delay += rand * delay if jitter
23 
24 warn "attempt #{attempt} failed (#{error.class}: #{error.message}); retrying in #{delay.round(2)}s"
25 sleep(delay)
26 retry
27 end
28 end
29end
01 / 01
STEP 01

Walkthrough

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Three takeaways
  1. 1Retrying only a curated list of transient errors avoids masking real bugs that should fail fast.
  2. 2Exponential backoff capped by a maximum delay prevents both thundering retries and unbounded waits.
  3. 3Adding jitter spreads out retries from many clients so they don't all reconnect in sync.

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