[mjb]

Absolutely. I made some graphs of different kinds of jitter approaches at http://www.awsarchitectureblog.com/2015/03/backoff.html. Simply backing off with delay does very little to spread out spikes of work, and can lead to longer MTTRs if the cause of the issue was overload.

[sgk284]

Would it be possible for the server to simply return a queue position to the contending clients? For instance, "There are 37 clients ahead of you. Try again in 37ms." (assuming each write is averaging 1ms)

I suspect if the client and server worked together in this fashion you could get much closer to the linear completion time seen with no backoff and also closer to linear work (since each client would try exactly twice in an ideal world where the server accurately predicted when it should try again).

[cpeterso]

Sorry. I accidentally down voted your comment when trying to up vote it on my phone! The article was very interesting.