DO NOT run scheduled requests to a public server at the top of the hour, pick a random minute. The worst victims of this problem are community NTP servers - at every hour and especially 00:00:00 UTC, the traffic spike is just impressive.
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@niconiconi Also, don't retry more quickly when you receive an error (or some specific kind of error). If you think of it in these terms it's pretty obvious, but it's something that people sometimes get wrong by omission.
