🏗️ DevOps & Infrastructure

Duplicate Requests: The Wild API Trick That Slashes Tail Latency

Picture this: your API's buckling under load, P99 latency hits 4.7 seconds, naive retries make it worse. Then they send duplicates—and everything improves. How?

theAIcatchup Apr 10, 2026 4 min read
Line graph of P99 latency dropping from 4.7s to 2.5s with hedging vs naive retries

⚡ Key Takeaways

  • Hedging duplicate requests counterintuitively reduces server load while slashing tail latency by 47%. 𝕏
  • Ditch attempt-count retries for time budgets to avoid storms. 𝕏
  • Parallelism + cancellation beats backoff in correlated failure modes. 𝕏
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theAIcatchup

Community-driven. Code-first.

#API resilience #API retries #hedged requests #request hedging #retry storms #tail-latency

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Originally reported by Dev.to

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