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Handle Polymarket bot reliability as three separate problems: stay within each service’s rate limits, retry only requests that are safe to retry, and restore WebSocket market state before trading again. Polymarket documents IP-based throttling and additional per-signer limits for CLOB orders and cancellations. For the market WebSocket, send the application-level PING every 10 seconds and expect PONG; reconnect timing and recovery steps are your client’s responsibility.
Why one global rate limit is the wrong model
Polymarket publishes different limits by service and endpoint rather than one quota for every bot request. Its rate-limit documentation describes Cloudflare throttling based on client IP, with sliding-window limits. When a client exceeds a limit, requests may be delayed or queued rather than immediately rejected. CLOB order and cancellation requests also face separate token-bucket limits per signer. A bot may therefore be within its IP budget but still exceed a signer’s trading budget, or vice versa. See Polymarket’s rate-limit documentation for current limits and endpoint details.
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Published values can change. The page gives examples such as 9,000 requests per 10 seconds for CLOB general traffic, alongside separate market-data and trading endpoint limits, including burst and sustained limits. Treat the live endpoint tables and response behavior as authoritative rather than embedding these values as permanent constants.
Track budgets at the right scope
- Keep separate counters for each service and endpoint; include the HTTP method where it helps distinguish request classes.
- For CLOB orders and cancellations, also account for the signer-specific token-bucket budget.
- Smooth bursts instead of issuing the whole budget at once. Use batching only where the endpoint supports it.
- For live market updates, prefer the documented WebSocket stream over repeated polling where it meets your needs.
- Log endpoint, method, status, elapsed time, and sanitized request context. Rising latency or queueing can warn that the bot is consuming too much capacity.
These are client design practices, not guarantees about how Polymarket will throttle a particular request.
How to handle HTTP 429 and 503 responses
Use the response’s Retry-After value when it is supplied, but keep service-specific error behavior in scope. The Data API v2 reference says retryable 429 or 503 responses can include Retry-After in seconds. It also identifies a server-side database connection timeout as a 503 request_timeout, not a 429. Do not assume that every Polymarket API has identical response semantics.
Build a bounded retry policy
- Classify the failure. Retry transient throttling or server errors when appropriate; do not retry invalid input, authentication failures, or signature errors as if they were temporary.
- If
Retry-Afteris present, wait at least the stated delay. If it is absent and the failure is retryable, use client-selected backoff with jitter. - Set a maximum attempt count or elapsed-time deadline. When the budget is exhausted, surface the failure instead of retrying indefinitely.
- Record each attempt and its delay so repeated throttling or server failures can be diagnosed.
The reviewed documentation does not establish a universal retry count or backoff schedule. Choose limits according to the operation’s urgency and the bot’s recovery budget.
Do not blindly repeat an ambiguous order submission
A timeout does not prove that an order was rejected; the request may have reached the service even if the client did not receive the response. Before resubmitting an order after an ambiguous timeout, reconcile the order state through the appropriate CLOB data rather than risking a duplicate. Apply the same question—whether the operation is safe to repeat—to cancellations and other writes instead of treating every request like a public read.
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Keep the market WebSocket alive
The documented market stream endpoint is wss://ws-subscriptions-clob.polymarket.com/ws/market. Subscribe to the market topic with one or more asset or token IDs using the format in Polymarket’s market WebSocket documentation. The stream can deliver events including book, price_change, last_trade_price, and tick_size_change.
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Send the text frame PING every 10 seconds; the server replies with PONG. Run this application-level heartbeat independently of market-event traffic. A quiet market may produce no price updates, so using event activity alone as a liveness test can cause a healthy but quiet connection to look dead. The documented 10-second interval is specific to this market stream.
Reconnect without trading on stale market data
The market-stream page specifies the heartbeat and subscription behavior but does not prescribe a client reconnect algorithm, retry count, or backoff ceiling. The following is a client-side recovery pattern, not an exchange requirement.
- Detect failure. Treat a socket close or error, or a missed expected heartbeat response, as a connection failure.
- Invalidate live state immediately. Mark the local book stale and prevent strategies that require current market data from acting on it.
- Reconnect with bounded exponential backoff and jitter. Use a client-defined maximum delay and recovery deadline so repeated outages do not cause rapid, synchronized connection attempts.
- Restore subscriptions. After reconnecting, send the market subscription again for the asset or token IDs the bot needs.
- Rebuild or reconcile the book. Obtain or await a fresh snapshot and apply subsequent updates in the correct order. Do not assume missed events were replayed while disconnected.
- Resume only when state is coherent. Confirm that the local book is based on a fresh snapshot and current updates, then permit strategies that depend on it to trade.
Track disconnect duration and stale-book age. These metrics help distinguish a brief transport interruption from a prolonged period in which the bot should remain out of the market.
Choose retry behavior by request and recovery risk
Before adding a retry, identify the request class, applicable budget, server-provided delay, safety of repeating the operation, and the evidence needed to confirm recovery.
Best Value
| Request or state | What to account for | Recovery decision |
|---|---|---|
| Public read | Service- and endpoint-specific IP limits; a retryable response may provide Retry-After. |
Retry transient failures within a finite budget; do not repeat invalid requests. |
| CLOB order write | IP-side limits plus per-signer order limits; a timeout can leave acceptance ambiguous. | Reconcile order state before resubmitting after an uncertain result. |
| CLOB cancellation | IP-side limits plus separate per-signer cancellation limits. | Account for the cancellation budget and verify resulting order state where needed. |
| Market WebSocket | Documented market endpoint, subscription, and 10-second application-level heartbeat; no vendor-prescribed reconnect schedule. | Reconnect using a bounded client strategy, restore subscriptions, and rebuild or reconcile local market state before trading. |
For each class, define a retry deadline that fits the bot’s purpose. A public read may be safe to repeat, while a trading write with an unknown outcome calls for state reconciliation first. For the WebSocket, the key recovery check is not simply that the socket is open; it is that the local book is fresh and coherent.
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