adolf/docs/concepts/retry.md

---
summary: "Retry policy for outbound provider calls"
read_when:
  - Updating provider retry behavior or defaults
  - Debugging provider send errors or rate limits
title: "Retry policy"
---

## Goals

- Retry per HTTP request, not per multi-step flow.
- Preserve ordering by retrying only the current step.
- Avoid duplicating non-idempotent operations.

## Defaults

| Setting            | Default   |
| ------------------ | --------- |
| Attempts           | 3         |
| Max delay cap      | 30000 ms  |
| Jitter             | 0.1 (10%) |
| Telegram min delay | 400 ms    |
| Discord min delay  | 500 ms    |

## Behavior

### Model providers

- OpenClaw lets provider SDKs handle normal short retries.
- For Stainless-based SDKs such as Anthropic and OpenAI, retryable responses (`408`, `409`, `429`, and `5xx`) can include `retry-after-ms` or `retry-after`. When that wait is longer than 60 seconds, OpenClaw injects `x-should-retry: false` so the SDK surfaces the error immediately and model failover can rotate to another auth profile or fallback model.
- Override the cap with `OPENCLAW_SDK_RETRY_MAX_WAIT_SECONDS=<seconds>`. Set it to `0`, `false`, `off`, `none`, or `disabled` to let SDKs honor long `Retry-After` sleeps internally.

### Discord

- Retries on rate-limit errors (HTTP 429), request timeouts, HTTP 5xx responses, and transient transport failures such as DNS lookup failures, connection resets, socket closes, and fetch failures.
- Uses Discord `retry_after` when available, otherwise exponential backoff.

### Telegram

- Retries on transient errors (429, timeout, connect/reset/closed, temporarily unavailable).
- Uses `retry_after` when available, otherwise exponential backoff.
- HTML/Markdown parse errors are not retried; they fall back to plain text on the first attempt.

## Configuration

Set retry policy per provider in `~/.openclaw/openclaw.json`:

```json5
{
  channels: {
    telegram: {
      retry: {
        attempts: 3,
        minDelayMs: 400,
        maxDelayMs: 30000,
        jitter: 0.1,
      },
    },
    discord: {
      retry: {
        attempts: 3,
        minDelayMs: 500,
        maxDelayMs: 30000,
        jitter: 0.1,
      },
    },
  },
}
```

## Notes

- Retries apply per request (message send, media upload, reaction, poll, sticker).
- Composite flows do not retry completed steps.

## Related

- [Model failover](/concepts/model-failover)
- [Command queue](/concepts/queue)