Learn about rate limiting in the Mambu Payments (formerly Numeral) API
Rate limiting
The Mambu Payments API is rate limited. API requests above the rate limit will return an HTTP 429 - Too Many Requests response code. These API requests are not processed by Mambu Payments and can be retried with the same idempotency key with no risk.
Exponential backoff and jitter
To retry API requests that were rejected due to rate limiting, we recommend using an exponential backoff with jitter:
- Exponential backoff: wait 1 second, then 2 seconds, then 4 seconds, etc.
- Jitter: add a random millisecond value to your wait time (e.g., wait 4.23 seconds instead of exactly 4 seconds) to avoid the thundering herd problem
Best practices to prevent rate limiting
To prevent rate limiting, we recommend:
- Implementing client-side throttling with queue-based processing or token bucket algorithm
- Caching
GETresponses - Using bulk actions to create payment orders, internal accounts, and VOP requests
- Using webhooks to receive events instead of polling the API