Forking mainnet with Hardhat + Alchemy fails with "Too Many Requests"

Question

Running into a problem attempting to test with hardhat by forking mainnet. I'm following the instructions here: https://hardhat.org/hardhat-network/docs/guides/forking-other-networks. I have a mainnet app configured in my Alchemy account and am using its API key. The problem I'm seeing is, when I run

npx hardhat node --fork https://eth-mainnet.g.alchemy.com/v2/[API_KEY]

(with a valid API key of course) it fails with:

Error HH604: Error running JSON-RPC server: Too Many Requests error received from eth-goerli.g.alchemy.com.

Looking at the app logs in the Alchemy dashboard, sure enough, there are tons of 429 errors associated with calls to eth_getTransactionCount. This is a brand new app I've created in Alchemy as well. I tried pinning to a specifick block as well but it didn't seem to make a difference.

Why am I getting rate-limited simply trying to start the hardhat node?

Answer 1

A 429 error is a code that specifies that your app has exceeded its compute unit per second capacity (throughput). Throughput is a measure of the number of requests your application can send per second. It is often known as the applications "rate limit". If a large number of requests are sent at the same time, you may hit your throughput capacity.

See: https://docs.alchemy.com/reference/throughput

Answer 2

429 error from a specific API change the API

  web3.eth.getTransactionCount(address, defaultBlock)
 .then((count) => {
console.log(`The transaction count for ${address} at ${defaultBlock} is 
${count}`);
 })
 .catch((error) => {
console.error(error);
  });
 const fetch = require('node-fetch');

  const url = 'https://example.com/api';
  const maxRetries = 3;
 let retries = 0;

 function fetchData() {
fetch(url)
.then(response => {
  if (response.status === 429 && retries < maxRetries) {
    const delay = 1000 * (2 ** retries);
    retries++;
    setTimeout(fetchData, delay);
  } else if (response.ok) {
    return response.json();
  } else {
    throw new Error('Error fetching data');
  }
   })
  .then(data => {
  console.log(data);
  })
  .catch(error => {
  console.error(error);
});
}

fetchData();
  function sendRequest(url, retries = 0) {
    return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
   request(url, (error, response, body) => {
      if (error) {
      if (retries < maxRetries && response.statusCode === 429) {
      const delay = 2 ** retries * 1000; // Exponential backoff delay
      setTimeout(() => {
        sendRequest(url, retries + 1)
          .then(resolve)
          .catch(reject);
         }, delay);
        } else {
         reject(error);