Glossary · Reliability
Rate limit
Also called: HTTP 429, API throttling, Too Many Requests
A rate limit is a cap an API puts on how many requests a client may make in a time window; requests over the limit are refused, usually with HTTP status 429 Too Many Requests.
APIs limit traffic to protect themselves and share capacity fairly. Limits come in several shapes: requests per second, per minute or per day; per user, per app or per account; sometimes separate pools for reads and writes.
What a well-behaved client does
- Reads the response. A
429often comes with aRetry-Afterheader saying how many seconds to wait. Honour it. - Backs off. Without a hint, wait and retry with exponential backoff and jitter, a bounded number of times.
- Spreads the load. Process a list of 500 records at a steady pace instead of firing 500 requests at once.
- Spends fewer calls. Batch endpoints, filters ("modified since"), and caching lookups that don't change within a run.
Where automations hit limits
- Polling too often. A polling trigger every minute is 1,440 calls a day per workflow, before any actions.
- Loops. One API call per item in a big list.
- Shared quotas. Salesforce, for example, gives each org a daily API allowance shared by every integration you've connected.
When a limit is hit, the worst outcome is silent data loss. Retries plus a dead-letter path for items that still fail keep the work recoverable.
In Fluxo Flow
Connector calls honour Retry-After on 429 and 503 responses and retry a small, bounded number of times; some connectors also pace requests (Notion at three per second, for example). Polling triggers never check faster than your plan's schedule interval or the app's own minimum. The REST API has per-plan rate limits, and webhook triggers are rate-limited per caller and workflow.
Read next
Related terms
- Exponential backoffExponential backoff is a retry strategy in which the wait before each new attempt grows exponentially (for example 1, 2, 4, 8 seconds), usually with random jitter, up to a maximum number of attempts or delay.
- Polling vs webhooksPolling means your system asks another system for new data on a fixed schedule; webhooks mean the other system pushes each event to you the moment it happens.
- Dead-letter queueA dead-letter queue is a holding place for messages or items that couldn't be processed after all retries, kept aside with their error so a person can inspect, fix and replay them instead of losing them.
- RBAC (role-based access control)Role-based access control (RBAC) is a way of managing permissions in which access rights are attached to roles (such as Admin, Editor or Viewer) and people get rights by being assigned a role, rather than permission by permission.
- Prompt injectionPrompt injection is an attack in which text that a language model processes (an email, a web page, a document) contains instructions that override or subvert the instructions the developer gave it.