Retrying Client Errors Caused MuleSoft Production Noise; Fix Retries Only Transient Failures
A team shipped a MuleSoft API that retried every failed request three times, including 400, 401, and 403 errors that could never succeed on retry. This flooded the logs with repeated failures and led a downstream system to throttle them, which is how the problem surfaced. The article argues that client errors should fail fast and be logged once, while only transient errors such as 408, 500, 502, and 503 should be retried. Retries should also use increasing backoff, such as waiting 2, 4, and 8 seconds, to avoid overloading recovering systems. The team reported that switching to a status-based retry check took about ten minutes and immediately reduced production noise.
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