{
  "id": 12576650,
  "title": "Retry, Backoff, and Jitter for NHTSA DecodeVinValues Without Thundering Herds",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/07/retry-backoff-and-jitter-for-nhtsa-decodevinvalues-without-thundering",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-10-07T07:50:39.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/vin_lookup_8dbd4710f77e9e/retry-backoff-and-jitter-for-nhtsa-decodevinvalues-without-thundering-herds-29n1"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": null,
  "summary": "The article discusses the importance of implementing a retry mechanism with exponential backoff and jitter for the NHTSA DecodeVinValues API to prevent \"thundering herds\" of requests when multiple clients fail simultaneously. The author provides a TypeScript helper function, singleFlight, which ensures that only one request is made for a given VIN, rather than multiple concurrent requests. The article also outlines the criteria for when to retry requests, focusing on transient failures like network resets and timeouts, while discouraging retries for non-transient issues such as invalid VINs or sparse 200 responses with incomplete data. The recommended approach for handling retries is to use exponential backoff with full jitter, which spreads out the requests more evenly and avoids overwhelming the API during peak times.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}