Ratelimits

Even though PRAW respects the X-Ratelimit-* headers and waits the appropriate time between requests, there are other unknown ratelimits that Reddit has that might require additional wait time (anywhere from milliseconds to minutes) for things such as commenting, editing comments/posts, banning users, adding moderators, etc. PRAW will sleep and try the request again if the requested wait time (as much as 600 seconds) is less than or equal to PRAW’s ratelimit_seconds configuration setting (default: 5s), PRAW will wait for the requested time plus 1 second. If the requested wait time exceeds the set value of ratelimit_seconds, PRAW will raise RedditAPIException.

For example, given the following Reddit instance:

import praw

reddit = praw.Reddit(..., ratelimit_seconds=300)

Let’s say your bot posts a comment to Reddit every 30 seconds and Reddit returns the ratelimit error: "You're doing that too much. Try again in 3 minutes.". PRAW will wait for 181 seconds since 181 seconds is less than the configured ratelimit_seconds of 300 seconds. However, if Reddit returns the ratelimit error: "You're doing that too much. Try again in 6 minutes.", PRAW will raise an exception since 360 seconds is greater than the configured ratelimit_seconds of 300 seconds.