I Stopped Scheduling My n8n Workflows on the Hour — My 429s Disappeared
I Stopped Scheduling My n8n Workflows on the Hour — My 429s Disappeared Part of my build-in-public series on running LLM workflows in n8n in production. This week's incident was embarrassing in retrospect: three workflows, one API key, all firing at 09:00 sharp — and the API's rate limiter doing exactly what it was paid to do. The morning three workflows agreed to DDoS me Last Tuesday I woke up…
On Tuesday, the reporter experienced a failed batch of production workflows due to scheduling issues. All three workflows fired at 09:00, leading to a 429 Too Many Requests error from the API. The issue was caused by the API's rate limiter, which was triggered by all three workflows making parallel LLM calls within a single per-minute rate window.
The reporter had unintentionally self-inflicted a DDoS attack by scheduling all three workflows at the same time every morning. The investigation revealed that staggering the schedules by five minutes eliminated the pileup of requests. The reporter also added a small Wait node with a random delay to prevent bursts from aligning to the second.
After implementing these changes, the reporter saw zero 429 rejections in the following two weeks, saving time previously spent on manual re-runs.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.