Facing issues with API rate limits in my Intercom app—any solutions?

Hey ​@catjack! Emily here from Support Engineering at Intercom 👋🏼
 

You could consider implementing exponential backoff. This strategy involves retrying failed requests with increasing delays, which helps manage network errors and avoid hitting rate limits.

Here's a basic approach:

• Initial Request: Make a request to the API.
• Retry on Failure: If the request fails, wait for a short period (e.g., 1 minute plus a random number of seconds) before retrying.
• Increase Delay: If subsequent retries fail, double the wait time (e.g., 2 minutes, then 4 minutes) before each retry.
• Maximum Retries: Continue this pattern up to a set maximum number of retries.

For implementation, you can use libraries that handle exponential backoff automatically, such as:

retry for Node.js
backoff for Python
retries for Ruby

These libraries simplify the process by managing the retry logic for you, allowing you to specify the number of retries and handling the rest :)

If you want to learn more about API usage you can read more from our docs here 👈🏼