429 (Too Many Requests) from RDM Live Departure Board web service

[RailAleFan]

Hi all, and seasons greetings!

After months and months of no problems whatsoever, out of nowhere, and starting on Christmas Day with traffic way below usual i've started to see sporadic 429 (Too Many Requests) errors from the Live Departure Boards web service.

I'll get in touch with support in due course once I've had a chance to put additional logging in place both as my own double check and to demonstrate the request profile coming from my network but was just wondering out loud if anybody else has noticed the same?

It would not have been diligent to migrate from my own Push Port consumer to the new RDM web services without ensuring the request rate was acceptable so I setup a shadow process querying the RDM in parallel with my own endpoints - no problem at all.

I then ramped it up significantly and was able to reach 50 requests per second before getting a 429 response; and my live traffic is running at nowhere near that rate...

Cheers!

[Peter Hicks]

Hello

On Saturday, 27 December 2025 at 14:53, RailAleFan <raila...@gmail.com> wrote:

After months and months of no problems whatsoever, out of nowhere, and starting on Christmas Day with traffic way below usual i've started to see sporadic 429 (Too Many Requests) errors from the Live Departure Boards web service.

This may be entirely unrelated, but there's an iOS app (see https://www.reddit.com/r/uktrains/comments/1pfuhxu/comment/nw5w6vl/?context=1) which requires that each user signs up to OpenLDBWS for a user token just to use the app.  The developer thinks it's 'better' this way as they don't have to run a server.

I'll get in touch with support in due course once I've had a chance to put additional logging in place both as my own double check and to demonstrate the request profile coming from my network but was just wondering out loud if anybody else has noticed the same?

More sideways-thinking here, but a 429 might indicate that the server is serving too many requests, and not that your specific token has made too many requests.  Do you get anything in the response headers that indicates the server that issued the 429?

Peter

[RailAleFan]

Hi Peter,

More sideways-thinking here, but a 429 might indicate that the server is serving too many requests, and not that your specific token has made too many requests.  Do you get anything in the response headers that indicates the server that issued the 429? 

That on the face of it looks to be the case - the response headers indicate that both OK (200) and the sporadic Too Many Requests (429) are coming from the same origin; with the 429's responding that > 100 requests per second has been exceeded. My own request rate is not even in that order of magnitude...

{
  "fault": {
    "faultstring": "Spike arrest violation. Allowed rate : MessageRate{messagesPerPeriod=100, periodInMicroseconds=1000000, maxBurstMessageCount=10.0}",
    "detail": {
      "errorcode": "policies.ratelimit.SpikeArrestViolation"
    }
  }
}

Will follow up with RDM support.

Cheers