MImichalc·Aug 26, 2025Submission
Python backoff is now archived
1 points · Open discussionlitl
backoff
Python2018–2025
litl / backoff · Archived
backoff
Python library providing function decorators for configurable backoff and retry
8Distinct people
8Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.7KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Python library providing function decorators for configurable backoff and retry
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year8 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-04-14 07:17:37 UTC to 2025-08-26 12:20:05 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 2 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
8 sourcesLooks like the entire GitHub organization is archived. Anyone know what happened? The most I see is:
https://github.com/litl/backoff/issues/211
In Python backoff repository was archivedPython backoff repository was archived
4 points · Open discussionbackoff is good, too: https://github.com/litl/backoff
I moved away from tenacity because of type-checking issues. I might check out stamina next time.
In Show HN: Retry a command with exponential backoff and jitter (+ Starlark exprs)Backoff doesn't look bad.
I have used two libraries for retrying in Python: retry (https://github.com/invl/retry) and Tenacity (https://github.com/jd/tenacity).
Tenacity actually helped me with a recent GPT-4o mini experiment,
when OpenRouter gave me an error after a couple hundred requests.
I can recommend Tenacity.
A downside is that the API is fairly complex and verbose.
You will probably look it up each time if you don't use it often (or rely on an IDE or LLM).
Backoff seems somewhat less flexible than Tenacity (https://github.com/litl/backoff/issues/125) but more concise.
Basic use requires as little code as retry and should be easy to remember.
In Ask HN: What are some unusual but useful Python libraries you've discovered?I use https://github.com/litl/backoff for configurable backoff + retry
context: OpenAI API used to be super flaky back in the early days, i needed to retry my requests quite frequently and i found this
In Ask HN: What are some unusual but useful Python libraries you've discovered?Would be interesting to read more specific comparisons with existing mature libraries, e.g. backoff [0]. Feeling I get from reading the motivation behind a new library is that most of it can be achieved by using backoff and perhaps a custom delegating decorator that remaps parameter names and does extra checks if necessary.
[0] https://github.com/litl/backoff
In Opnieuw: A simple and intuitive retrying library for PythonBackoff: Python function decorators for configurable backoff and retry
49 points · Open discussion