Managing high loads

This guide covers how to handle rate limits and manage high loads when using Prolific’s API.

Rate limits

Currently, Prolific does not have any explicit rate limits on API calls. Rate limits are implicit based on the amount of activity in your workspace at the time of the API call.

Where an API call hits a rate limit, the endpoint will return a 429 Too Many Requests error. Please retry with exponential back-off when this occurs.

We also recommend using our Webhooks to subscribe to updates on your studies, over polling the GET studies endpoints. See more information on this here.

If you find that rate limiting is causing significant issues, or you intend to use the API for a large number of participants, please reach out and let us know here so our support team can keep an eye out for participants’ messages.

Best practices

• Exponential back-off: When you receive a 429 response, retry with exponential back-off
• Use webhooks: Instead of polling endpoints, subscribe to webhook events for real-time updates
• Bulk operations: Use bulk endpoints where available to reduce the number of API calls
• Rate limit awareness: Check each endpoint’s docs for any explicit limits, this is most common for money-related operations.