Exponential Backoff with Jitter

When retrying failed requests, waiting a fixed interval causes thundering herd — all clients retry simultaneously and hammer the server again. Exponential backoff increases the wait time after each failure (1s, 2s, 4s, 8s…), but if all clients started at the same time they still retry in sync. Jitter adds randomness to the delay — wait = random(0, min(cap, base * 2^attempt)) — so retries spread out naturally and the server gets breathing room to recover.