The message (which?) says "down for maintenance," instead of actually reporting the issue to the user (unless you know enough to know what the 429 in the footer means).
I think the old pre-thumbor error message was better in that it actually told you what the issue was. (what did that say?)
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open | None | T353950 [Tracking] Thumbnail 429 rate limiting on failed requests of complex or broken media files | |||
| Open | None | T175512 thumbor 429 throttled error messages are confusing |
"Too many requests" is very clear and it's the standard description for HTTP 429, as per the corresponding spec. If the error message lacks visibility at the bottom, it's an issue with the now standard error template, not with the particular error code/standard error message combo.
With the error page standardization effort, the old error message would have looked just like 429s do now.
When I encountered this error (T260272) I thought "oh my, Wikimedia is being DDOSed". When I realized that thumbnail generation for other files still worked fine, I was certain the errror was a bug.
Either remove the "too many requests" message as it's meaningless and confusing, just leave 429 for the techies. "too many requests" means "make less requests, please" but that's generally not the issue. Alternatively, expand the message and explain there could be all kinds of things causing this.
+1 to Alexis. Here is just one request, but it fails all the time: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carte_topographique_de_la_Corse,_1824_(15503010),_grayscale.jpg
OK, it is a big file, but this one https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carte_topographique_de_la_Corse,_1824_(15503010).jpg is the same size, and it works.
This is doubly annoying because of T343796.
I can't get a working thumbnail for https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Center-Filled_LIMA.jpg
I always face http 429 errors but I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with the actual error. Example:
Request from 2a01:e0a:4e5:6b30:51ca:c1ac:4415:a99d via cp6001 cp6001, Varnish XID 234078745 Upstream caches: cp6001 int Error: 429, Too Many Requests at Mon, 09 Oct 2023 20:19:11 GMT
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T260272#6380529
I see a thumbnail for your file. (only for the current revision)
Copying https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T409450 content here for reference
Returning a 429 error is very detrimental to "bots" like Kiwix scraper which builds offline ZIM archives of Wikimedia projects.
Returning a 5xx error would be way better (or even anything which is not an invitation to retry, most 4xx codes are fine as well).
First because a 429 can only cause more traffic, to retry this query (429 is an invitation to retry).
Second because in our specific case we've made the move to a more respectful logic where we try to guess to best interval between queries based on 429 errors returned, but if the upstream begins to send 429 when there is not too much traffic, then we are doomed.