DocuSign API Timeout While Fetching Envelopes During Backfill

Hi DocuSign Community,

We are experiencing API timeouts while fetching envelopes from DocuSign during a historical backfill operation.

Error received from the DocuSign API:

{
  "errorCode": "UNSPECIFIED_ERROR",
  "message": "Execution Timeout Expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding."
}

Our observations:

• The issue occurs while fetching envelopes for historical backfill.

• The backfill started on October 9.

• Our current implementation allows fetching up to 1,000 envelopes per API request, based on the documented API limit.

• When fetching a large number of envelopes, the API request sometimes fails with the above timeout error.

Questions:

1. Is there any known limitation or server-side timeout when requesting up to 1,000 envelopes in a single API call?

2. Does DocuSign recommend a smaller page size (for example, 100 or 200 envelopes) for large historical backfill operations?

3. Are there any specific API rate limits, throttling policies, or recommended practices we should follow when fetching large volumes of envelopes?

4. Could this error indicate a temporary issue on the DocuSign API side, or is it more likely related to the request size or processing time?

We would appreciate any recommendations or best practices for reliably fetching large volumes of historical envelope data without encountering API timeouts.

Thanks in advance for your help!