Undocumented OAuth token rate limits

Around a month ago I discovered a discrepancy in the 5 requests per second per base rate limit when using an OAuth token.

Executing this snippet with unique base ID’s and a PAT results in success, executing the same snippet with an OAuth token results in a 429.

I assumed maybe applying a global rate limit of 5 requests across per second across all bases would work but it didn’t. For now I’ve settled on a global rate limit of 4 requests per second across all bases, it seems to work reliably.

Airtable staff have confirmed that I’m running into an undocumented rate limit which can’t yet be disclosed due to details not being finalised.

Just wanted to share this to inform people and to find out whether others have encountered this.