Backoff Overflow at High Attempts Debugging Lab

Backoff Overflow at High AttemptsReliabilityMediumPreparing workspaceAutosaved

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Incident Dossier

Backoff Overflow at High Attempts

A retry policy was tuned to back off exponentially, but during a long brownout an on-call engineer noticed the scheduler trying to sleep for `Infinity` milliseconds after a deep retry chain. The retry budget looked fine on paper, yet no further attempt ever fired because the delay helper was producing non-finite values.

Initial failing signaldelay returns Infinity for very large attempt countsExpected delay stays finite and capped · received delay(1000) is Infinity

Progress

1Reproduce the bugRun checks

2Edit the fixOpen

3Pass checksOpen

4Submit fixOpen

Reproduction Steps

Run npm test.
Inspect the delay function and ask what `2 ** 1000` evaluates to in JavaScript.
Notice that the comparison branch returns the overflowed exp rather than the cap.
Clamp the exponent or the final value so the helper always returns a finite number.

Focus Mode

Start

src/backoff.js

Likely area

src/backoff.js

Progressive hints

Hints reveal broad direction first, then narrow toward the suspect path without showing hidden tests or exact solution code.

TopicReliability

DifficultyMedium

Est. time18 min

Workspacecreating

Explorer

Preparing workspace files…

Evidence Map

Failing signal loaded from challenge API
Workspace files loaded from workspace API
Results rendered only after API run/submit

Autosaved

workspace

Outputread-onlyready$ workspace boot

Workspace booting...