We’re running a nightly sync job to update custom attributes for about 2,000 agents using the Python SDK. The script iterates through a list of users and calls update_user for each one. It works fine for the first few hundred, then we start hitting 429 Too Many Requests errors consistently.
The current logic is pretty basic. Just a simple loop with a hardcoded time.sleep(0.5) between requests. I thought that would be enough to stay under the rate limit, but it seems the limit is per-user or per-resource in a way I’m not accounting for. Or maybe the burst capacity is lower than I expected.
Here’s the relevant snippet:
from genesyscloud.platform.client import PlatformClient
import time
def update_agents(user_list):
client = PlatformClient.create_from_config('config.yaml')
for user in user_list:
try:
client.users.update_user(
user_id=user['id'],
body={'custom_attributes': user['attrs']}
)
print(f'Updated {user["id"]}')
except Exception as e:
print(f'Error on {user["id"]}: {e}')
time.sleep(0.5)
The error response usually looks like this:
{
"code": "429",
"message": "Too Many Requests",
"status": 429
}
I’ve seen mentions of exponential backoff in the docs, but I’m not sure how to implement it cleanly with the SDK’s exception handling. Do I need to parse the Retry-After header? The SDK doesn’t seem to expose that directly in the exception object.
Also, is there a better way to batch these updates? I don’t see a bulk endpoint for user attributes, just individual updates. Should I be using a queue with a worker pool instead of a single-threaded loop? We’re trying to avoid making this too complex, but the current approach is failing about 30% of the time.
Any ideas on how to handle the retry logic properly without bloating the code? We’re using Python 3.9 and the latest SDK version. I’ve tried increasing the sleep time, but that just makes the job take longer without fixing the 429s. The job runs at 2 AM GMT, so load should be low, but the errors still happen. I’m guessing it’s a global rate limit rather than tenant-specific. How do others handle this scale?