Why p-retry isn't enough for production and what to do instead

You're sending an email. The SMTP server hiccups. Your code throws. The email never sends. Nobody knows.

That's the silent failure problem. Most retry libraries solve half of it. They retry. But they don't answer the harder question:

What happens to the jobs that never succeed?

This article walks through three production failure patterns and how to fix all of them with job-retry, a Node.js package I built that handles backoff, timeouts, and dead letter queues in one place.

The three ways basic retry fails you