Implementing exponential backoff for 429 errors during bulk user updates with Python SDK

Is there a clean way to handle rate limiting when updating a large batch of users via the Genesys Cloud Platform API?

I am processing a list of 500+ user updates. I’m using the PureCloudPlatformClientV2 Python SDK. The initial requests succeed, but after about 20-30 calls, I start hitting 429 Too Many Requests. The SDK does not seem to have a built-in retry mechanism that respects the Retry-After header automatically in the way I expected for bulk operations.

Here is my current implementation:

from platform_sdk_python import Configuration, ApiClient, UsersApi
import time

config = Configuration()
config.host = 'api.mypurecloud.com'
# auth setup omitted for brevity
client = ApiClient(config)
users_api = UsersApi(client)

user_ids = ['id1', 'id2', 'id3'] # ... 500 ids

for uid in user_ids:
 try:
 body = {"email": "[email protected]"}
 users_api.post_users_user(user_id=uid, body=body)
 except Exception as e:
 if e.status == 429:
 # I tried a static sleep, but it's inefficient
 time.sleep(1)
 # Should I retry here or just break?
 else:
 raise e

I read this in the documentation:

“Clients should respect the Retry-After header if present in a 429 response. If not present, a standard exponential backoff strategy is recommended.”

How do I properly parse the Retry-After header from the SDK exception object? The exception doesn’t seem to expose headers directly in the standard Exception class. Do I need to catch a specific SDK exception type that contains response metadata? Or is there a utility in the SDK for this?

Also, should I be chunking the requests or using a semaphore to limit concurrency? The default SDK client seems to handle one request at a time in this loop, but I’m still getting throttled quickly.

How I usually solve this is by wrapping the SDK call in a simple retry loop. The SDK won’t handle 429 gracefully out of the box.

  1. Catch ApiException with status 429.
  2. Read the Retry-After header.
  3. Sleep for that duration before retrying.

Don’t ignore the header value. Hardcoding delays causes unnecessary latency.