linkRate Limiting

linkAvoiding the rate limiter

Sometimes, you may find yourself occasionally needing to send API requests in high volume, causing rate limiting errors. Here are a few things to try:

1. Slow down. If you're sending a large sequence of requests, add a small delay of 1–200ms between each request and see if that improves things. This is especially important when paginating large datasets or creating resources in bulk.
2. Add jitter. In cases where you're running a cron job or invoking requests at a set interval across multiple machines, adding in some "jitter" can help reduce a thundering herd problem. In this case, "jitter" can simply be random delay value of 10ms to 10m, to help spread out the licensing requests across time.
3. Add caching. In order to reduce request volume, you can cache previous responses for a set duration, to avoid hitting the network with superfluous requests. You can store response signatures to verify cache integrity.
4. Use a token pool. In some instances, it may be more feasible to issue additional tokens to support higher request volume. For example, if you were attempting to license a fleet of hundreds of machines which all shared the same IP, you may want to issue a pool of tokens instead of a single token.
5. Obey the headers. If all else fails, you can look at the rate limiting headers above and derive a delay from the X-RateLimit-Reset header once your X-RateLimit-Remaining count falls below a certain threshold.