Search results not appearing due to rate limiting / 429s

[johnnyreilly]

Hello!

I was doing some testing on my phone (android pixel 8a) and found that typing ts-loader (one of my packages) into the search bar lead to no results:

The URL at this point was https://npmx.dev/search?q=ts-loader

If you take the URL and open a brand new browser tab with that URL all behaves as expected:

I'm not sure what the cause of this might be, but I thought I'd raise it. I'll try on a laptop when I get a moment and see if it is the same behaviour there as well.

[serhalp]

This is a known issue that occurs when you get rate-limited by npm while searching. We bubbled that up as a 404 and to make matters worse the (client side navigation payload) 404 gets cached, so even backspacing and re-typing the query doesn't fix it.

[johnnyreilly]

Oh no! Well at least it's not a mystery. Given rate limiting is involved, this will probably impact anyone typing into the search bar.

Would it be good to have some kind of client side restrictions on the search http request being sent? For instance denouncing the input box to reduce unnecessary requests when users are typing?

[johnnyreilly]

I can confirm that this happens on the desktop too - here's some 429s:

You can see duplicate requests in the network tab as well

[johnnyreilly]

Interestingly, running locally with pnpm dev the issue does not present:

Same when running locally with pnpm build && pnpm preview:

Which kind of makes sense I guess? If it did present locally someone else would have stumbled on this

It appears to be a heisenbug

[johnnyreilly]

I experimented with the debouncing approach and it didn't make much difference alas. On the plus side (?) I did manage to replicate the issue locally

[johnnyreilly]

I made some tweaks on a fork to show a "Hit npm rate limit, try again in a moment" message when 429s happen. I wonder if this would be useful?