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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-guide mentions 500, but not 503).

In the .NET SDK there's this note:

https://github.com/dropbox/dropbox-sdk-dotnet/blob/a7d7f817e38b799ef13e35b7d1bf6b68b170f992/dropbox-sdk-dotnet/Dropbox.Api/DropboxRequestHandler.cs#L396

// dropbox maps 503 - ServiceUnavailable to be a rate limiting error.
// do not count a rate limiting error as an attempt

The comment was added a long time ago - is it still valid and correct? Am I good to just wait a few seconds (maybe with some exponential backoff) and retry the request?

Why is a 503 error returned instead of a JSON indicating a rate limit problem (e.g. with error "too_many_requests")?

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Comments

Greg-DB

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

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

Thanks for the feedback!