Why do I get the error "429_client_error" with my Slack bot?

Question

I am working on a note taking Slack bot and I keep getting the 429_client_error. First of all, is it the same error as the 429 too many requests error describe in the Slack API documentation here ? If not, what is it ?

If it is indeed due to the Slack rate limits, I don't understand. I printed a log of all the bot answers and they are sent at least a second apart. I also have the error even when I use the note taking bot "very slowly" and wait between requests.

Here is an exemple of interaction.

User : I want to add a note.

Slack-Bot : Sure. What is the content of your note ?

User : I met with my Abigail yesterday. I need to send him the pictures I took Saturday.

Slack-Bot : Go on.

User : I am done.

Slack-Bot : Great. You can add one of the following participants to your note.

Abigail Allan

Brian Bernard

Carl Carlson

Done

At this last part, I use interactive messages with buttons to propose participants. Behind the scenes, I actually load more than 3 people, so when the user chooses to add Brian for example, my bot replaces the whole message with a new list of participants the user can choose from. Then, when the user is done, he has to select the last button "done".

In other words, I have a list of buttons that keeps updating each time the user select one item in the list until the user is satisfied.

This seems to be part of the problem, since I seem to get the 429_client_error only at this stage of the conversation. I use delays to ensure that the Slack bot does not answer too fast for the user. I don't understand what is the problem.

I have some issue when more than 100 channels requests WebClient for files.list data gives Rate limiting error then stop getting files data — Jignesh Vagh, Aug 23 '18 at 07:15
did you find a solution to this problem @EmiliePicard-Cantin? — eirik, Jul 10 '19 at 17:10

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 21 '20 at 08:42

I ran into the same issue on a python application for slack and found a discussion about it in the slacker github repo.

According to the slacker main developer os, the solution are local caches of the information. They're even providing a sample code here:

from slacker import Users

class CachedUsers(Users):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(Users, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.user_ids = {}

    def get_user_id(self, user_name):
        user_id = self.user_ids.get(user_name)

        if not user_id:
            user_id = super().get_user_id(user_name)
            self.user_ids[user_name] = user_id

        return user_id

If you're looking into stuff that cannot be cached locally before, check out the rate limits you can find the tier on each method in the Slack API.

Why do I get the error "429_client_error" with my Slack bot?

1 Answers1