Technology for determining an amount of time to wait to retry requests to a representational state transfer (REST) server system for a REST resource, where the time to wait is always chosen to be a prime number of time units (for example, slots, milliseconds). While currently conventional systems will sometimes use a prime number of time units to wait for a retry request, various embodiments of the present invention will always, and invariably, use a prime number of time units. The REST resource may be, for example, a REST application programming interface (API) that is requested by and delivered to a client system using hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP).