Retry Strategies

Message retry strategies allow you to specify how much of a delay should occur before retrying a message.

Delays between retries can be useful when messages fail handling due to race conditions, service unavailability, or concurrency reasons.

By default, @node-ts/bus uses a DefaultRetryStrategy that exponentially increases the delay between each retry attempt. Additionally, it will introduce a random variance of 10% for each delay to help unblock messages that are failing when processed at the same time.

Additional strategies can be implemented to suit your application.

Choosing a Retry Strategy

A retry strategy can be provided to the bus configuration on initialization by using .withRetryStrategy()

For example:

const bus = await Bus.configure()
  .withRetryStrategy(DefaultRetryStrategy)
  .initialize()

Custom retry strategies

A custom retry strategy can be provided by implementing the RetryStrategy from @node-ts/bus-core.`

retry-strategy.ts

export type Milliseconds = number

/**
 * Defines how a message retry strategy is to be implemented that calculates the delay between subsequent
 * retries of a message.
 */
export interface RetryStrategy {
  /**
   * Calculate the delay between retrying a failed message
   * @param currentAttempt How many attempts at handling the message have failed
   * @returns The number of milliseconds to delay retrying a failed message attempt
   */
  calculateRetryDelay (currentAttempt: number): Milliseconds
}

An example of a retry strategy is as follows

default-retry-strategy.ts

import { Milliseconds, RetryStrategy } from './retry-strategy'

const MAX_DELAY_MS = 2.5 * 60 * 60 * 1000 // 2.5 hours
const JITTER_PERCENT = 0.1

/**
 * A default message retry strategy that exponentially increases the delay between retries
 * from 5ms to 2.5 hrs for the first 10 attempts. Each retry delay includes a jitter of
 * up to 10% to avoid deadlock-related errors from continually blocking.
 */
export class DefaultRetryStrategy implements RetryStrategy {
  calculateRetryDelay (currentAttempt: number): Milliseconds {
    const numberOfFailures = currentAttempt + 1
    const constantDelay: Milliseconds = Math.pow(5, numberOfFailures)
    
    const jitterAmount = Math.random() * JITTER_PERCENT * constantDelay
    const jitterDirection = Math.random() > 0.5 ? 1 : -1
    const jitter = jitterAmount * jitterDirection
    
    const delay = Math.round(constantDelay + jitter)
    return Math.min(delay, MAX_DELAY_MS)
  }
}