I’ve been using the APIs in the last week and noticed I’m consistently getting “429 Too Many Requests” errors when rate limiting to 60 calls/minute (which is the documented recommendation ). Also well within the other limits (running less than 1000/day) Seems similar to these issues: https://forum…

you’re going to be in the best position to troubleshoot your own code. without looking at it, i would just guess that there’s something wrong with your code. i would doubt that there’s actually bug in the system. [image] iorek: currently rate limits are set to 30 calls/minute (which works witho…

pyinaturalist rate limits to 60 requests per minute by default, and that has been reliable for a long while. Increasing the number of requests per iteration wouldn’t cause that limit to be exceeded. @jcook and I reviewed @iorek 's code and don’t think it’s at fault.

I tested and reproduced this with your current version (git hash 8f85dc9) both with your custom rate limiting and also simplified to use pyinaturalist’s built-in rate limiting. First, I tested with 30 calls per minute via your own ratelimit wrapper to establish that it does not fail with the rate r…

[image] benarmstrong: at 60 calls per minute it starts to raise 429 errors after running for a while. Furthermore, with the patch below to let pyinat rate limit on its own to 60 calls per minute, it also eventually starts to raise 429 errors. at which iteration is it running into 429 errors? …

[image] pisum: at which iteration is it running into 429 errors? i ran 75 GET v1/observations/histogram requests at 1 req/sec through my own thing in Javascript, and i didn’t see any errors. I just did a run and I’m seeing it start at the 190th request - and just about 190 seconds in. Eyebal…

I’ll try implementing it as a direct call to the API to make sure it’s not an issue in pyinaturalist

[image] iorek: I just did a run and I’m seeing it start at the 190th request okay… i tested with more requests, and i finally am able to repeat the problem you noted. i tried sending sets of requests with various incremental delay between initiation of requests, and the below table summarize…

I am not surprised at all. I confirm that the limitation is becoming increasingly strict in practice. I slow down to 20 (or 15) requests to the API per minute in order to avoid the 429 error (and I let my software run day and night). It also depends on what you request. The most sensitive is reque…

[image] pisum: i’ve sent sets of hundreds of requests at 1 req/seq to /v1/observations, v1/observations/species_counts, and v1/observations/observers without issue in the past. i did a set of ~250 requests with incremental delay of 1 req/sec on /v1/observations without issue. so i believe thi…

Thanks @pisum and everyone else for the excellent analysis. I’m obviously not going to sweat it over 55 vs 60 calls per minute. But given that the documented maximums are 100 requests/minute I’m going to leave this open to reconcile the actuals with the doc and maybe determine why this API is beha…

429 Error from /observations/histogram API when calling at 60 calls/minute

Bug Reports

pisum May 20, 2025, 3:33pm 12

i was doing this again this morning, and i’m running into the 429 errors on /v1/observations. so maybe the problem now affects more than just /observations/histogram now?

Topic		Replies	Views
Discrepancy between documented rate limit & observed rate limit Bug Reports api	3	2225	January 28, 2020
Api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations/{id} limited to 30 observations, not 200 Bug Reports	3	191	September 18, 2024
Observation search API not consistently returning the number of records specified in per_page Bug Reports	7	514	November 24, 2020
Constant 429 errors Bug Reports	11	537	March 2, 2024
/v1/taxa endpoints cap observations_count at 10,000 Bug Reports api	4	719	October 24, 2019

429 Error from /observations/histogram API when calling at 60 calls/minute

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