Decorrelated jitter has a major flaw: clamping. Retry intervals can get repeatedly clamped to the maximum allowed duration. This can significantly reduce the amount of jitter applied.
For comparison, a standard exponential backoff algorithm is:
sleep = min(max_duration, min_duration * 2 ** attempt)
With “full jitter”, this turns into:
sleep = random_between(0, min(max_duration, min_duration * 2 ** attempt))
Whereas “decorrelated jitter” is this:
sleep = min(max_duration, random_between(min_duration, prev_sleep * 3))
Let’s break this down into two parts:
# First: increase the sleep value by multiplying it.
# Can produce at most 3x max_duration.
temp = random_between(min_duration, prev_sleep * 3)
# Second: clamp it
sleep = min(max_duration, temp)
The sleep duration will generally increase every iteration. When the previous sleep grows as large as max_duration there is only a 1/3 chance of applying jitter. E.g.:
max_duration = 10
min_duration = 1
prev_sleep = 10
# From 1 - 30
temp = random_between(1, 10 * 3)
# From 1 - 10
sleep = min(10, temp)
This isn’t great. In this case, 2/3 of the time the sleep will simply be the max_duration.
One way to work around this is to make sure that you won’t hit this maximum by keeping the number of retries small, and the maximum duration sufficiently high. But this is likely to surprise many people. It’s probably better to use another algorithm.