Is Retry-After returned as seconds or date?

Both are valid. Always detect whether it is delta-seconds or HTTP-date from actual values.

What is the minimum requirement to stop retry storms?

Implement all four together: Retry-After compliance, exponential backoff, jitter, and retry caps.

How to Diagnose Retry Storms on 429/503

When clients keep retrying immediately after 429/503, incidents can last longer. The fastest path is to check Retry-After and real retry behavior together.

Typical symptoms

Request rate does not drop even after 429/503 responses
Retry-After is present but clients do not wait
Only specific clients show excessive retries

Diagnostic steps

1) Capture real status/Date/Retry-After values with Response Headers Parser
2) Use Retry-After Inspect to classify delta-seconds vs HTTP-date
3) Confirm intended semantics of 429/503 with HTTP Status Inspect
4) Use Server-Timing Inspect to correlate overload windows with retry bursts
5) Validate client implementation (wait units, retry cap, jitter)

Common causes

Retry-After seconds are treated as milliseconds
On HTTP-date parse failure, clients fall back to immediate retry
SDK enforces fixed waits and ignores Retry-After values
Client/server clock drift breaks wait-time calculations

Operational checklist

Inventory Retry-After endpoints and include them in monitoring
Require exponential backoff with jitter in retry logic
Log 429/503 reason codes and retry counts
Monitor NTP sync continuously to detect clock drift early

Post-fix verification

Verify retry intervals follow Retry-After values
Confirm peak traffic drops during retry-heavy periods
Ensure throughput recovers normally after incident resolution

Tools to use

FAQ

Is Retry-After returned as seconds or date?: Both are valid. Always detect whether it is delta-seconds or HTTP-date from actual values.
What is the minimum requirement to stop retry storms?: Implement all four together: Retry-After compliance, exponential backoff, jitter, and retry caps.

Referenced specs

Next to view (diagnostic order)

These links are generated from site_map rules in recommended diagnostic order.

HTTP Header Parser — Parse raw headers into structured lists
Response Headers Parser — Parse response headers into structured data
Retry-After Inspect — Parse Retry-After and inspect retry wait behavior
HTTP Status Inspect — Analyze HTTP status codes and suggest handling direction
Server-Timing Inspect — Parse Server-Timing and inspect latency metrics
Symptom-Based Diagnostic Guide (Start Here) — A central hub that routes cache/CORS/JWT/MIME incidents into shortest symptom-first diagnostic paths
How to Diagnose Missing 304 Responses — Trace ETag/Last-Modified and If-* round trips to isolate missing 304 behavior
How to Diagnose Stale Content After Deployment — Check cache policy by HTML/API/static assets to isolate stale deployment issues quickly

Same-theme links

Scenario Clusters

Operational incident scenarios that route you into the shortest diagnostic path

Symptom-Based Diagnostic Guide (Start Here) — A central hub that routes cache/CORS/JWT/MIME incidents into shortest symptom-first diagnostic paths
How to Diagnose Missing 304 Responses — Trace ETag/Last-Modified and If-* round trips to isolate missing 304 behavior
How to Diagnose Stale Content After Deployment — Check cache policy by HTML/API/static assets to isolate stale deployment issues quickly
How to Diagnose CORS Preflight Failures — Fix preflight failures by validating OPTIONS responses, Allow-* directives, and origin rules in order
JWT 401/403 Diagnostic Playbook — Separate 401 and 403 using Authorization, WWW-Authenticate, claims, and signature checks
How to Diagnose JS/CSS Blocks from nosniff Mismatch — Trace Content-Type vs nosniff mismatches, fallback responses, and delivery-layer rewrites
How to Diagnose Set-Cookie Not Persisting — Isolate cookie persistence failures by checking Domain/Path/Secure/SameSite in order
How to Diagnose Lost Login After OAuth Return — Isolate cookie-delivery failures after IdP return across SameSite, Secure, Path/Domain, and collisions
How to Diagnose Same-Name Cookie Collisions — Resolve unstable behavior by tracing same-name cookie path/domain variants, overwrite order, and send collisions
Cookie Incident Operational Checklist — Standardize response from triage to permanent fixes across storage failures, OAuth return issues, and same-name collisions