Rate Limiting and Delays

Rate limiting is essential for ethical scraping. It protects servers and helps avoid detection.

Why Rate Limiting Matters

Basic Delays

Random Delays

Exponential Backoff

Respecting Crawl-Delay

Rate Limit Headers

Adaptive Rate Limiting

Request Throttling

Complete Rate Limiting Example

Key Takeaways

• Always add delays between requests
• Use random delays to appear more human
• Implement exponential backoff for retries
• Check and respect Crawl-delay in robots.txt
• Monitor rate limit headers in responses
• Adaptive rate limiting adjusts to server responses
• Build rate limiting into your scraper class
• When in doubt, slow down