In this paper, it is shown that, in DS/CDMA mobile systems, halving or doubling the spreading factor (HSF or DSF) when retransmission is requested possibly improves the throughput. Given transmit power, DSF essentially decreases probability of packet error (PPE) by increasing the signal energy per information bit. It, however, doubles the time duration needed for transmitting the original packet. On the other hand, HSF increases PPE. It, however halves the time duration required to carry the original packet. Thus, the efficiency of HSF in DSF as a retransmission strategy depends on the amount of increased or reduced PPF after HSF or DSF is selected. With achieving given residual error probability (REP) in CDMA systems, the effective throughput is evaluated in this paper to find conditions with which HSF or DSF achieves better performance than using the original one. Analytic results show that HSF or DSF performs better when relatively small or big changes in their PPE's are present, respectively.