Error message 429

General
1

I am trying to access the gnomAD page and I get the error message 429 Too Many Requests.

2

Also been having this issue, or simply ‘unable to get results’ for several weeks now on and off - mainly on

3

Thanks for reporting this.

We’ve been getting greatly increased bot traffic over the last year, and in particular over the last month. We have been trying to address this from both sides in terms of trying to:

  • Reduce demand on browser, by way of targeted rate limiting of traffic that looks like bot activity.
  • Increase capacity of the browser, by way of improvements to our existing backend

Generally speaking, we’re also looking more medium term at changes to our datastore that would allow us to handle more traffic, amongst other things.

We became aware of a particular rule we enabled aiming to target a major spike in traffic that happened over a weekend, though that rule seemed include some amount of real users of gnomAD, resulting in more widespread 429s for a subset of users. We mostly rolled back that too-aggressive rule on Monday, September 28th, and anecdotally speaking, we heard from several specific users that we were in contact with that things had improved for them, in addition to seeing in the logs much more traffic getting through (and not 429’d) from users matching that rule.

If this is not the case for you, I may request some additional information and reach out to you directly.

Thank you for your continued patience, we realize this is not ideal. The greatly increased amount of traffic (on the scale of orders of magnitude of increases) puts much more demand on our servers, so we’re working on several different options to help better address this.