Hey everyone,
I’m trying to automate some user updates for our support team (changing skills and routing profiles) using a simple Python script. We’ve got about 200 users to update, so I figured I’d just loop through them. It’s working fine for the first batch or so, but then the API starts throwing 429 Too Many Requests errors left and right.
I thought I had the retry logic sorted. I’m checking the Retry-After header and sleeping for that amount of time plus a bit of jitter. But it seems like the counter resets or something, and I end up in a loop where I get a 429, wait, get another 429, wait again… eventually the script just hangs or fails out.
Here’s the core of my loop. I’m using the requests library.
import requests
import time
import random
def update_user(user_id, skills):
url = f"https://api.mypurecloud.com/api/v2/users/{user_id}"
headers = {
"Authorization": f"Bearer {token}",
"Content-Type": "application/json"
}
payload = {"skills": skills}
max_retries = 5
attempt = 0
while attempt < max_retries:
try:
response = requests.put(url, json=payload, headers=headers)
if response.status_code == 200:
print(f"User {user_id} updated successfully")
return True
elif response.status_code == 429:
# Check for Retry-After header
retry_after = response.headers.get("Retry-After")
if retry_after:
wait_time = int(retry_after)
else:
# Fallback exponential backoff
wait_time = (2 ** attempt) + random.uniform(0, 1)
print(f"Got 429 for {user_id}. Waiting {wait_time}s...")
time.sleep(wait_time)
attempt += 1
else:
print(f"Unexpected status: {response.status_code}")
return False
except Exception as e:
print(f"Error: {e}")
return False
return False
The issue is that even after sleeping for the Retry-After duration, the next request often fails immediately with another 429. Is the header value misleading? Or am I hitting a different rate limit bucket than the one the header refers to?
I’ve seen people mention using the X-RateLimit-Remaining header, but I’m not sure how to factor that into the loop effectively without overcomplicating things. Just want to get this script to run through all 200 users without manual intervention. Any tips on how to structure the backoff better? Or is there a specific Genesys Cloud limit I’m missing here?