You
Our retries turned a blip into a full outage.
ChatGPT
Synchronised retries are an attack on your own service. Exponential backoff with jitter and a cap, plus a circuit breaker that stops trying entirely once failures dominate. Without jitter every client retries at the same instant, which is precisely the thundering herd.
You
How do I know when it stops being worth it?
ChatGPT
When you stop noticing it. If it has not surfaced a problem in six months, it is either solved or it was never the bottleneck you thought.