Immunize Rate Limit No Backoff

rate-limit-no-backoff

HTTP APIs return 429 when the caller is rate-limited. Code that ignores the status and calls raise_for_status() immediately crashes the whole script on the first throttle — even though a second attempt a few seconds later would almost always succeed:

requests.exceptions.HTTPError: 429 Client Error: Too Many Requests

Example

Wrong — happy-path only; dies on the first 429:

def fetch_user(client, user_id):
    resp = client.get(f"/users/{user_id}")
    resp.raise_for_status()
    return resp.json()

Right — bounded retry with exponential backoff on 429:

import time

def fetch_user(client, user_id, max_attempts=4):
    resp = None
    for attempt in range(max_attempts):
        resp = client.get(f"/users/{user_id}")
        if resp.status_code != 429:
            break
        time.sleep(2 ** attempt)
    resp.raise_for_status()
    return resp.json()