Within the Airtable node, it seems I can’t set the Max. Tries value to anything above 5 and the Wait Between Tries (ms) value to anything above 5000. This is frustrating, because sometimes I need to set much longer retries due to Airtable API issues. However, that’s not possible in the n8n UI:
I suspect these limits were set at some sort of global level (applied equally across all node types), but I’m not sure.
Rather than trying to come up with better upper limits, could we just have the upper limit check code disabled through some sort of global configuration setting (like an ENV variable)? That would help a ton.
To Reproduce
Create a new workflow
Specify an Airtable Create or Update node
Click gear icon
Enable Retry On Fail
Specify a Max. Tries value of 20
Specify a Wait Between Tries (ms) value of 20000
Save the workflow
Open back up the Airtable node
Click the gear icon
See that both values are set much lower than specified.
Expected behavior
I expect n8n to allow me to set arbitrarily high values for Max. Tries and Wait Between Tries (ms). I really don’t want any annoying guard rails here.
Google Sheets often has downtimes of 2-3 minutes which makes workflow planning much harder without being able to have the execution handle it directly.
The 5000ms retry is the same it seems across all nodes. Have checked a good number and all default to max of 5000ms
As a workaround of sorts, you can change the error processing of the node to use an error output, add a wait node which you can set to anything and then loop it back to the node input.
Although you wont have your max # of tries using the wait loop method. you could add a an if node in there to check against a counter if you needed to keep that.
Indeed, those limits does not make any sense, especially for self-hosted.
Some API are pretty strict in rate limiting, and the Agents fail because of that, If I could raise the wait time I could workaround the issue and my workflow would be working.
Currently, my only solution would be to throw more money at the API provider. Does not make sense.