Forum Discussion

tipako's avatar
tipako
Explorer | Level 4
2 years ago

ServiceUnavailable 503 when doing a lot of requests - expected rate limit error

When there are a lot of requests to the API, at some point a 503 - ServiceUnavailable error code is returned. The documentation does not cover this case (https://developers.dropbox.com/error-handling...
API
Greg-DB's avatar
Greg-DB
Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
2 years ago

Dropbox does currently use 429 for explicit rate limiting, but there are a number of different error cases, some of which may return a 500 or 503. (The way these were handled has changed somewhat over the years and across API versions.)

 

In any case that you get a 5xx (such as 500 or 503), retrying the request after a short delay, with an exponential backoff as you mentioned, is a good way to handle these.

tipako's avatar
tipako
Explorer | Level 4
2 years ago

Thanks for the confirmation. I think it would be great if this information could be added to the API's "error handling guide", which already covers other HTTP result codes, but not this one. Judging by the amount of posts here in the forums, the 503 code is confusing many developers

  • Greg-DB's avatar
    Greg-DB
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    2 years ago

    Thanks for the feedback!

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