---
title: "Beginner’s guide to exponential backoff in Google Apps Script for handling rate limit errors"
author: "Phil Bainbridge"
date: 2024-12-18T19:21:57+00:00
canonical_url: https://pulse.appsscript.info/p/2024/12/beginners-guide-to-exponential-backoff-in-google-apps-script-for-handling-rate-limit-errors/
markdown_url: https://pulse.appsscript.info/p/2024/12/beginners-guide-to-exponential-backoff-in-google-apps-script-for-handling-rate-limit-errors.md
categories:
  - "Beginner"
  - "Snippet"
  - "Video Tutorial"
tags:
  - "pbainbridge.co.uk"
featured_image: https://pulse.appsscript.info/files/2024/12/ExponentialBackoffsamplecode.png
description: "This post from Phil Bainbridge provides a beginner Apps Script code example for implementing exponential backoff, a technique used to retry a failed process with increasing delays between attempts. The code is designed to handle rate limit errors, specifically the \"Rate Limit Exceeded\" error encountered when updating Google Calendar events too frequently. Phil explains the key elements of the code, including variables to control retry count and delay duration. The code is available to copy and includes a main function to test the exponential backoff implementation."
---

# Beginner’s guide to exponential backoff in Google Apps Script for handling rate limit errors

![Beginner’s guide to exponential backoff in Google Apps Script for handling rate limit errors](https://pulse.appsscript.info/files/2024/12/ExponentialBackoffsamplecode.png)

> Exponential Backoff, a process by which when something fails you try again a set number of times whilst increasing the delay between each attempt.
> [https://www.pbainbridge.co.uk/2024/12/exponential-backoff.html](https://www.pbainbridge.co.uk/2024/12/exponential-backoff.html)Sample Apps Script code for Exponential Backoff

The following Google Apps Script is designed to explore Exponential Backoff – a process by which when something fails you try again a set number of times whilst increasing the delay between each attempt, up to a certain point.

I needed this for a tool I built which adds Guests to a Calendar event from a Google Form submission. Whilst I was using [ScriptLock**](https://www.pbainbridge.co.uk/2023/11/control-form-submissions-with-script.html) to prevent simultaneous submissions, the code ran so fast that it would infrequently trip the Calendar API with the following error message “API call to calendar.events.patch failed with error: Rate Limit Exceeded”.

By infrequently I mean a reported issue only once in 3,500 submissions over the course of 12 months. Enough however to take the opportunity to learn about Exponential Backoff and to squash that single instance.

Just a note that this is one way to implement it.

Source: [The Gift of Script: Exponential Backoff**](https://www.pbainbridge.co.uk/2024/12/exponential-backoff.html)

---

*Published by [Phil Bainbridge](https://pulse.appsscript.info/p/author/phillipbainbridge/) on [Pulse](https://pulse.appsscript.info/). Original article: [https://pulse.appsscript.info/p/2024/12/beginners-guide-to-exponential-backoff-in-google-apps-script-for-handling-rate-limit-errors/](https://pulse.appsscript.info/p/2024/12/beginners-guide-to-exponential-backoff-in-google-apps-script-for-handling-rate-limit-errors/)*