Suddenly seeing rate limit errors

[martinhoest]

Hi,

We have millions of files in a Dropbox for Business team folder.

We've build a filing system internally, which is more specialized to our use case than any general purpose storage solution like Dropbox.

We also build a "sanitization tool", where our internal users can view files in Dropbox and select which to migrate to our own platform.

We've had this in test for about a month, and now all of a sudden we're starting to see rate limit errors when calling the Dropbox API download function.

Was something changed recently?

I tried setting up a new app in the App Console, and got the rate limit quite fast.

[Greg-DB]

The Dropbox API does have a general rate limiting system, but I don't believe anything has changed significantly recently. Rate limiting can vary over time though, due to a variety of factors, e.g., other user activity or server issues.

In any case, note that not all 429s and 503s indicate explicit rate limiting, but in any case that you get a 429 or 503 the best practice is to retry the request, respecting the Retry-After header if given in the response, or using an exponential back-off, if not. You should also check the actual response body from the Dropbox API call for more information.

If you'd like us to check on this for your app(s) or team specifically, though, please feel free to open an API ticket with some samples of the errors you're getting: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/contact