What Is a Rate Limit?
A rate limit is a control that restricts how many requests a client can make to a service within a given time window, rejecting or delaying excess requests. It protects the service from being overwhelmed, ensures fair sharing, and mitigates abuse. APIs commonly express it as requests per minute or hour, returning a 429 status when exceeded.
Why it matters
CI pipelines hit external APIs constantly, the GitHub API, container registries, package mirrors, and can trip rate limits during heavy parallel runs. Handling 429 responses with backoff, caching responses, and authenticating to get higher limits keep builds from failing on throttling.
Related concepts
- 429 Too Many Requests signals a limit hit
- Handle with retry and exponential backoff
- Authentication often raises the limit
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