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This Google Calendar step hit an error. The app returned "Rate Limit Exceeded".

 

We have unexpectedly reached some kind of rate limit, but we don’t understand why.

Overall we have invited 48 attendees on the same google calendar event.
Zapier seems to queue those invites (the trigger happens in Airtable), and we believe it tries to invite these people by batch. The first invite goes through but the second fails when it happens within a few seconds.

Typically below we have the execution of 4 invites at the same time (2 seconds delay), the first goes well, the second fails, the 3rd goes well and the fourth fails. It’s unclear why.

We looked into GCalendar limits https://support.google.com/a/answer/2905486 and notices we are bound to some limitation because we use a “Google for Nonprofits” plan. But the actual limits are not explicit.

Our initial goal was to invite a few dozen people to a Webinar event (the same event), we tried doing it using Airtable at first, but the Airtable integration behaves strangely by removing people before adding them again to the invite when changing the list of attendees (it seems to be thought to create a single event at a time rather than editing an existing event to add more invitees on top of the existing ones)n that’s why we decided to try Zapier, where we ran into the above-explained rate limit issue.

Do you have any suggestion as to why/how to avoid this rate limit? Thanks

 

 

Hi ​@Unly—hope you’re having a great Friday! 😁

Ah, it looks as though the Zap ran multiple times around the same time:

47069402cf472fd5f139ae4ab59577ae.png
 

Each app on Zapier has it’s own API limits and throttling mechanism. When a number of actions occur in a short space of time for an app they’ll often be throttled (limited) to prevent to many requests happening at once.

As the new records were added to the Airtable in bulk instead of one at a time, that’s what caused those rate limit errors. If you replay the Zap runs that errored now they should be able to go through successfully. 

If you’ll often be adding in new student records to Airtable in batches of a dozen then it may be worth adding a Delay After Queue action to help space out each request to Google Calendar’s API, so that you don’t continue to hit those rate limit errors going forward. You can learn more about how to use that type of Delay action here: Delay after queue.

Hope that helps to answer your question. If you run into any issues replaying the Zap runs or adding that Delay action just let me know—always happy to lend a hand! 🙂


​Hey ​@Unly, just checking in! Did the errored Zap runs go through successfully when replayed?

Keen to make sure you’re all set here, so please keep us posted on how it’s going. 🙂