Keep a failing dependency from taking you down

Task

A downstream API starts timing out and erroring. Retrying alone just piles more load on something already struggling, and a hung request ties up a caller indefinitely. You want bounded calls, a few smart retries, and a breaker that stops hammering a dependency that is clearly down.

Example

One way: layer timeout, retry, and circuit on a single stitch.

import { stitch } from 'stitchapi';

const orders = stitch({
    baseUrl: 'https://api.example.com',
    path: '/orders',
    timeout: { total: '10s', perAttempt: '3s' },
    retry: { attempts: 3, on: [429, 503], backoff: 'expo-jitter' },
    circuit: { failureThreshold: 5, cooldownMs: 30_000 },
});

const result = await orders();

How it works

Three layers compose. timeout bounds each attempt (3s) and the whole call (10s) with a real AbortSignal, so a hung request is actually cancelled, not leaked. retry recovers transient 429/503s with jittered backoff inside that budget. circuit watches the failures: after five consecutive it trips open and calls fast-fail for 30 seconds (STITCH_CIRCUIT_OPEN) instead of hammering a dead dependency, then lets a single trial call probe recovery. Together: a blip is retried, a hang is cut, and an outage stops being yours to absorb. All three report on the event stream (phases retry, circuit).

See also