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Forum Discussion
Rate limiting when uploading files with rclone
I've received complaints from rclone users that file uploads are progressing really slowly.
Digging into it what I see is this:
2020-09-03 11:44:33 DEBUG : too_many_requests/: Too many requests or write operations. Trying again in 15 seconds.
What happened there is rclone received the `upload failed: too_many_requests` error and backed off for 15 seconds according to the Retry-After header.
Dropbox didn't used to do this with rclone so I suspect we've hit some sort of rate limiting.
Note that rclone has 35,000 users at Dropbox generating 60M API calls per day!
I'm not sure this is the right channel for this kind of support - maybe rclone should be a tech partner?
Any help much appreciated - thanks!
Nick Craig-Wood
Rclone lead developer
[email removed as per Community Guidelines]
Thanks for the detailed feedback! I'm sharing this with the team.
- Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
Thanks for the report Nick! This may be due to some changes about how we return rate limit/lock contention errors and their Retry-After time windows. We'll look into it, but for reference, can you let me know, to the best of your knowledge, when you started seeing this?
Also, does rclone ever submit multiple uploads for the same "namespace" at the same time? If so, I recommend reviewing the Performance Guide, if you haven't already. In particular check out the "Batch Upload" section for guidance on how to most efficiently upload multiple files.
By the way, for support for issues like this, you can always find us on the forum here, or contact us directly by opening an API ticket here. Either way is fine. If you would additionally like to consider becoming technology partner, you can find more information and an application form here.
> We'll look into it, but for reference, can you let me know, to the best of your knowledge, when you started seeing this?
Unfortunately these errors don't show up in the integration tests logs otherwise I'd have an accurate timeline for you.
I received the first user report about this on the 2nd September 2020 and I verified it for myself today. The user that reported it to me was a new user though and it is possible/likely that the problem existed before then.
> Also, does rclone ever submit multiple uploads for the same "namespace" at the same time?
Yes it does. My understanding that a namespace could be a folder so rclone does uploads lots of file to the same folder and this is indeed the problem area that I'm seeing.
It looks like batch uploads could be helpful. Will they make a lot of performance difference?
The API doesn't look hard to implement but batch uploads are really bad fit architecturally for rclone - I'll need to think how that might work.
I ran my tests again now and it looks like rclone is rate limited to uploading 2 ish files per second. After about 100 uploads I start seeing the `too_many_requests` errors with a Retry-After of 15s.
Does batch uploading work-around that?
Thanks for the contact links - I couldn't find the developer ticket option earlier!
- Greg-DB
Thanks for the information! I'll follow up here once I have an update on this.
That batch upload functionality can improve performance overall, especially when you are seeing contention issues, but it will vary from case to case. It helps by only taking a lock once per batch, as opposed to once per file.
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