How to exponentially increase the interval for retries in Spring RequestHandlerRetryAdvice

Question

The retry is specified as follows:

<bean id="retryAdvice"
    class="org.springframework.integration.handler.advice.RequestHandlerRetryAdvice" >
    <property name="retryTemplate">
            <bean class="org.springframework.retry.support.RetryTemplate">
            <property name="backOffPolicy">
                    <bean class="org.springframework.retry.backoff.ExponentialBackOffPolicy">
                    <property name="initialInterval" value="5000"/>
                    <property name="multiplier" value="3.0"/>
                    </bean>
            </property>
            <property name="retryPolicy">
                    <bean class="org.springframework.retry.policy.SimpleRetryPolicy">
                    <property name="maxAttempts" value="6" />
                    </bean>
            </property>
            </bean>
    </property>
</bean>

I expected that the interval would be increased by 3 times with every attempt. In reality I got the following intervals: 5, 15, 30, 30, 30 seconds. See the exact times and intervals below. What did I specify incorrectly?

2016-05-10 10:07:49,714 - 0
2016-05-10 10:07:55,085 - 5.2
2016-05-10 10:08:10,457 - 15.4
2016-05-10 10:08:40,830 - 30.4
2016-05-10 10:09:11,230 - 30.4
2016-05-10 10:09:41,639 - 30.4

Answer 1

There is maxInterval to consider:

/**
 * Setter for maximum back off period. Default is 30000 (30 seconds). the
 * value will be reset to 1 if this method is called with a value less than
 * 1. Set this to avoid infinite waits if backing off a large number of
 * times (or if the multiplier is set too high).
 *
 * @param maxInterval in milliseconds.
 */
public void setMaxInterval(long maxInterval) {
    this.maxInterval = maxInterval > 0 ? maxInterval : 1;
}

So, when your ExponentialBackOffPolicy reaches 30 secs (default) it stops to use multiplier afterwards.

Answer 2

Increase the max interval to allow the multiplier to take effect.

<bean id="retryTemplate"     class="org.springframework.retry.support.RetryTemplate">
        <property name="retryPolicy">
             <bean class="RetryPolicy" 
             p:skipRetryFaults="${retry.skipForFaults}" 
             p:maxAttempts="${retry.maxAttempts}"/>
        </property>
        <property name="backOffPolicy">
            <bean class="org.springframework.retry.backoff.ExponentialBackOffPolicy">
                <property name="initialInterval" value="${backoff.initialInterval}" />
                <property name="maxInterval" value="${backoff.maxInterval}" />
                <property name="multiplier" value="${backoff.multiplier}" />
            </bean>
        </property>
    </bean>