Glossary / Developer basics
Glossary · Developer basics · checked Oct 24, 2026
HTTP 429 Too Many Requests (rate limit)
Short answerHTTP 429 means you sent too many requests in a time window. The server may send a Retry-After header with how long to wait. The fix is to slow down and back off, not to retry harder.
Why it matters
Retrying immediately makes it worse for you and everyone else; exponential backoff with jitter is the standard cure.
Our number
crates.io returned 429 to our crate fetcher at about 1 request a second on October 24, 2026, so it now waits 2 seconds between requests, sleeps 90 seconds on a 429 and stops after three in a row.
Go deeper on this site
Where it shows up here
It appears on 18 pages of this site: 10 Articles, 3 Guides, 2 The Manual, 1 developer, 1 path, 1 Free tool. A few to start with:
- Rust, LLMs, AI agents and app dev, with the receipts.
- Day 3: my AI agents got 500K views, 3 checkouts and $0. Here's what they changed.
- The Manual.
- Q.Why are crates.io download counts inflated?
- Step-by-step guides.
- How to deploy to Vercel from the CLI
- Token counter.
- Use Tensorust from your code or your agent.
Sources
- RFC 6585, section 4: 429 Too Many Requests: www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6585#section-4 (checked Oct 24, 2026)
- crates.io data access policy: crates.io/data-access (checked Oct 24, 2026)
Related terms
Up next
Go deeperExponential backoff with jitterThe page on this site that does the most with this term.Read it next →Also worth your time
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