How to fix the "Service invoked too many times for one day: urlfetch" error?

Question

I am getting the following error in my Google sheet:

Service invoked too many times for one day: urlfetch

I know for a fact I am not making 100k calls, but I do have quite a few custom functions in my sheet. I tried to make a new sheet and copy/paste the script into that one, but I still get the same error. I then switched my account, made a new sheet, added the code, and I still got the error.

Is this just because I am on the same computer? Is Google smart enough to realize I am the same person trying to do it? I highly doubt that, so I am wondering why it would be throwing this error, even after switching accounts and making a new sheet.

In addition to that, is there any way to make sure I don't go over the limit in the future? This error sets me back at least a day with what I was working on. I do plan to write a script to just copy/paste the imported HTML as values into another sheet, but until I get that working, I need a temporary fix.

---

Sample code:

function tbaTeamsAtEvent(eventcode){
  return ImportJSON("https://www.thebluealliance.com/api/v3/event/" + eventcode + "/teams?X-TBA-Auth-Key=" + auth_key);
}

function ImportJSONForTeamEvents(url, query, options){
  var includeFunc = includeXPath_;
  var transformFunc = defaultTransform_;
  var jsondata = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url);
  var object   = JSON.parse(jsondata.getContentText());
  var newObject = [];
  for(var i = 0; i < object.length; i++){
    var teamObject = {};
    teamObject.playoff = object[i].alliances
    
    newObject.push(teamObject);
  }
  
  return parseJSONObject_(object, query, "", includeFunc, transformFunc);
}

That is one "set" of code that is used for a specific function. I am pulling two different functions multiple times. I have about 600 of one function, and 4 of another. That would only be just over a thousand calls if all were run simultaneously.

I should note that I also have another sheet in my drive that automatically updates every hour with a UrlFetch. I do no believe this should affect this though, due to the very low pull rate.

Answer 1

I had a similar issue even though I was only calling two fetch calls in my functions and each function per data row. It exponentially grew, and with my data changing, every recalculate call also called those functioned, which VERY quickly hit the max.
My solution? I started using the Cache Service to temporarily store the results of the fetch calls, even if only for a few seconds, to allow for all the cells triggered by the same recalculation event to propagate using only the single call. This simple addition saved me thousands of fetch calls each time I accessed my sheets.

For reference: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/cache?hl=en