While exponential backoff is theoretically optimal, I doubt it's actually used that often in practice. I've seen too many cases where someone decides serving user requests with low latency is so important that they'd rather have a constant randomized backoff than exponential backoff. I've been in many design meetings and seen enough documents where the decision not to use exponential backoff is explicitly made, understanding the tradeoff with overloading and system recovery.
>>kccqzy+(OP)
I’ve had to… uhh… eagerly advocate for exponential backoff for weeks of constant uptime issues before someone listened and actually implemented it and solved the problems.
Like several times in different roles.
People do it, exponential backoff is everywhere in your stack, but it doesn’t end up in your application layer until you have enough traffic that you actually have to manage throughout.