. Ive seen parameters connect and task create in

seconds

and other times it takes 4 minutes.

This might be your backend (cleamrl-server) replying slowly becuase of load?

Is there a way (at the class level) to control the retry logic on connecting to the API server?

The difference in the two screenshots is literally only the URLs in

clearml.conf

and it went from 30s down to 2-3s.

Yes that could be network, also notice that there is auto retries that are quiet basically if a request is dropped due to network issues / timeout etc, it will automatically retry (but of course it will look slow from the outside because of the retries)