Aside from backoffs you could make groups of clients stagger their requests. Split them up so that half the clients make requests on even minutes (0,2,4,...) and the other half on odd minutes (1,3,5,...) (maybe based on the last octet of their IP address, or something similar).

In reply to Re: Help with exponential backoff by Fletch
in thread Help with exponential backoff by jdtoronto

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