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 behavior: delay stays finite and capped · actual behavior: 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

Challenge Coach

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

TopicReliability

DifficultyMedium

Est. time18 min

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Evidence Map

Failing signal loaded from challenge API
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workspace

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