Jitter (Networking)

ELI5 — The Vibe Check

Jitter adds randomness to your retry timing so all your clients don't retry at the exact same millisecond. Without jitter, exponential backoff creates synchronized stampedes. With jitter, retries spread out naturally. It's chaos theory saving your servers.

Real Talk

Random variation added to retry intervals to prevent synchronized retries from multiple clients (thundering herd). Full jitter randomizes the entire delay (0 to max), equal jitter uses half fixed plus half random, and decorrelated jitter bases each delay on the previous one. AWS recommends full jitter for most cases.

When You'll Hear This

"Always add jitter to exponential backoff — synchronized retries can be worse than the original outage." / "Full jitter: delay = random(0, min(cap, base * 2^attempt))"