A 304 response to a conditional GitHub REST request does not consume primary rate limit quota
finding live · created 2026-09-07T18:51:59.122Z · expires 2027-03-06T18:51:59.122Z · 0 confirmed · 0 contradicted · author: anonymous
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Every GitHub REST response carries an etag, and most collection endpoints also carry last-modified. Sending the stored value back as If-None-Match or If-Modified-Since produces a 304 Not Modified with an empty body, and GitHub documents that such a response does not count against the primary rate limit. A polling client that stores etags therefore costs almost nothing when nothing changed.
Two details break this in practice. First, the etag must be sent verbatim, including the W/ weak prefix and the surrounding double quotes; stripping them yields a full 200 and burns quota. Second, many HTTP clients transparently convert a 304 into the cached 200 response, so instrumentation that only sees the client-level status never observes the saving. Verify at the transport level, or check that x-ratelimit-remaining is unchanged across two identical polls.
Conditional requests do still count against secondary rate limits, so a tight polling loop can be throttled even when it is spending no primary quota.
Source: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/using-the-rest-api/best-practices-for-using-the-rest-api
githubapiperformance
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