Retry-After header upper limit or range

Question

Scenario:

We were doing some heavy operations using Microsoft Graph and SharePoint APIs.
Ans as usual due to heavy operations we received 429 (Throttling) in the response.

But from previous experience, we had seen 'Microsoft Graph API' sends max 10-20s in 'retry-after' header. 'SharePoint API' had send up to 300s in 'retry-after' header.

But recently we have observed 'Microsoft Graph API' also sending 'Retry-After' header with high values.

Observations:

POST: "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/drives/b!ctJlw490OkqH_ufKvIEcTSpVGwxmsGBLkHcQ2rjccZDzO2uAcpHkR5fGeT1QfF-F/items/01AWX3RQYDMEEOQFRILRDISIANYH4OIPZ2?$select=sharepointids"

RESPONSE:

Hitting endpoint for 1st Time

http-response: 429 Too Many Requests 

headers: 
'Retry-After' : 41

response-body:
{
    "error": {
        "code": "activityLimitReached",
        "message": "The request has been throttled",
        "innerError": {
            "code": "throttledRequest",
            "innerError": {
                "code": "quota"
            },
            "date": "2021-11-30T12:17:46",
            "request-id": "01c3bdb8-fbb1-4613-96ad-be961ba99e11",
            "client-request-id": "01c3bdb8-fbb1-4613-96ad-be961ba99e11"
        }
    }
}

RESPONSE:

Hitting endpoint for 2nd Time

http-response: 429 Too Many Requests 

headers: 
'Retry-After' : 315

response-body:
{
    "error": {
        "code": "activityLimitReached",
        "message": "The request has been throttled",
        "innerError": {
            "code": "throttledRequest",
            "innerError": {
                "code": "quota"
            },
            "date": "2021-11-30T12:18:27",
            "request-id": "d4e33010-58e5-4dca-bb75-a340505e5c45",
            "client-request-id": "d4e33010-58e5-4dca-bb75-a340505e5c45"
        }
    }
}

Question:

As you can see from above observations 'Retry-After' header received is '41' and '315' respectively, which are too huge.
Is there any range how high this can go, or some insides how exactly this 'Retry-After' header is determined ?

Answer 1

Hi @Aaditya Rane ,
Throttling limits vary based on the scenario. For example, if you are performing a large volume of writes, the possibility for throttling is higher than if you are only performing reads. Here is a document for Microsoft Graph throttling guidance
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/throttling#service-specific-limits

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