Best practice for 429 handling in distributed crawlers?

[minzf581]

Crawlee’s retry and autoscaling model is solid.

In large distributed agent scenarios, 429s often correlate with identity reuse patterns rather than raw concurrency.

Do you recommend request-level proxy rotation, or task-level identity isolation to reduce cascading rate limits?

Curious how you model long-lived agents vs burst crawlers in terms of network strategy.

[loquit-tud]

In distributed crawlers I’ve also observed 429s correlating more with identity reuse than raw concurrency.

Two practical tactics that helped:

Identity isolation: treat “identity” as (proxy + session + headers + TLS fingerprint) and rotate/partition it at the task level, not per-request. This reduces “cascading 429” where multiple workers share the same identity and all get rate-limited together.

External circuit breaker: add a lightweight pre-flight gate outside the crawler loop. Before each costly request, check a short sliding window keyed by a request pattern hash (action + task/url + step). If the same pattern starts repeating rapidly, stop early (e.g. ≤5 allow, 6–10 gray, 11+ block) instead of letting retries/requeues amplify.

I’m building ProceedGate around that “external fuse” model (one check before an expensive step; returns allow/block + a short-lived signed token). Not meant to replace Crawlee’s retry/autoscaling—just a guardrail for storms. Docs/quickstart: https://proceedgate.dev/docs.html.