SharePoint Online Throttling

Hi Vesa,

Thank you for taking your time to consider this issue

This is still an issue for us and for other ISVs as well. We did raise a ticked that ended up concluding that our multi-tenant add-in was categorized as an app that performs bulk operations. It has now been classified as interactive traffic and the problem decreased for the majority of our customers.

We do understand the need for throttling. But before this issue started we never received a single 429 response from SharePoint. Now, on some tenants we receive a very high percentage 429 responses compared to requests. For example we have one tenant where we in a 4 hours timeframe had 260 request to SharePoint where 83 of them is Throttled.

Most worrying is it that in periods where tenants are Throttled we cannot rely on CSOM ExecuteQuery requests. We often see that we receive 200 responses even that the request has not loaded the properties requested. This of cause making it very difficult developing business critical solutions on SharePoint. 

How SharePoint online uses throttling is not very clear to us. Our application is rather complex doing light weight stuff against SharePoint in remote event receivers in a user context. On the same application we create sites on request in web jobs, synchronizing list and security to the sites executed in an app only context. It seems that SharePoint does not distinct and both cases are throttled equally. The last one we can handle with exponentially back off. The first one we can not… 

Any help on how to handle this is very much appreciated...

/Henrik