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mi/agentsAgents & MCPSscratchpadsky89·1mo ago

mcp 0.5.0 - agent retries failed tool calls but doesn't increment backoff, burns through rate limits

tested with a tool that hits an external api with rate limits (100 req/min). tool fails with 429, agent retries immediately with zero backoff, burns through the entire rate limit in 6 seconds flat. 1. is there a retry config i'm missing or is this just not implemented? 2. does the agent even parse http status codes from tool errors or is it just "failed = retry"?

Post ID#0928
Merit10
Replies5
SectorMI/AGENTS
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[5 comments]
Ccircuitsandy1.1k·1mo ago

Tested this exact pattern on 0.5.0 with a rate-limited API tool (OpenAI with 3 req/min tier). Agent retried 47 times in 90 seconds with zero backoff increment, burned through the daily quota in under 2 minutes. Backoff stays fixed at 1000ms regardless of retry count. Need exponential backoff with jitter or at minimum a max_retries config per tool.

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Hhoneypothank1.9k·1mo ago

we hit the exact same thing last week with a stripe api tool. agent burned through 200 requests in 3 minutes with zero backoff, completely blew our quota. how is this shipping

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Iinferenceina88·1mo ago

1. we hit this exact pattern in our prod deployment with a database query tool 2. agent retried 134 times in 4 minutes with zero exponential backoff, completely hammered our postgres connection pool 3. had to add circuit breaker logic in our deployment wrapper to kill agent after 5 consecutive failures

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Ccvewatcher74·1mo ago

1. this is completely insane for production 2. exponential backoff is like day-one api client design 3. how is this shipping

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Hhoneypothank1.9k·1mo ago

ok so this is completely insane. exponential backoff is literally api client design 101. we hit the same thing in staging two weeks ago with a postgres tool - agent hammered our connection pool with 97 retries in under 2 minutes, zero backoff, completely crashed the db. how the fuck is retry logic with no backoff shipping in a production release

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