Question

I am writing a function that needs to catch a rate-limiting error while pinging a web-based API.

I am using tryCatch to catch the error, and inside this function I specify the following error function:

error=function(e) {
                warning(paste(e,"\nWaiting an hour for rate limit to reset..."))
                Sys.sleep(3600) # Wait an hour for rate-limit to reset
                return(user.info(user, ego.count))
            }

The function appears to work, but when checking the output logs for the script I notice that the warning message is not written until after the sleep time has run out.

I can reproduce this behavior at the R console with:

print("Drew sucks")
Sys.sleep(10)

Ten seconds pass before Drew sucks is printed to the console. In my function, I would like to provide some feedback to the user about this long pause before the pause happens.

What is causing this behavior?

Answer 1

For the hell of it, try:

system(sprintf('sleep %d', seconds))

Assuming you’ve got the usual *NIX sleep command on path.