REST API only returns a maximum of 30000 issue comments and no PR comments per repo

[hsteinmetz]

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I need to fetch all issue and pull request comments for a couple of repositories using the REST API. However, only a maximum of 30000 issue comments seem to be available per repo when using this endpoint.
If i try to fetch pull request comments, most of the time there is no data at all or some kind of error occurs. I'm using the /pulls/comments endpoint. No rate limits were hit before the API calls were made.

Is there a specific reason or any workaround for this?

[AryanGupta1112]

This is mostly expected behavior and not a bug in the API.

GitHub’s REST API has some practical limits when listing very large datasets, even if you don’t hit a rate limit. When a repository has a huge number of comments, the “list” endpoints don’t always let you paginate forever, which is why you often see a ceiling around ~30,000 issue comments in practice.

For pull request comments, there’s also a common confusion. GitHub has two different types of PR comments:
Review comments on code diffs → returned by
/repos/{owner}/{repo}/pulls/comments
Regular discussion comments on a PR → these are actually issue comments, returned by
/repos/{owner}/{repo}/issues/comments

So if you’re calling /pulls/comments and getting no data or errors, it’s usually because many PRs simply don’t have review/diff comments. Most PR discussion lives in the issue comments endpoint instead.

Workaround / best approach:

Fetch issue comments to get comments from both issues and PR discussions.
Fetch pull request review comments separately if you need inline code comments.
Use the since parameter and sync data incrementally instead of trying to fetch everything in one go.
If you need full historical data at scale, GraphQL is generally more reliable and flexible than REST for this kind of use case.

In short: you’re not doing anything wrong, this is just how GitHub structures and limits comment data in the REST API.

[hsteinmetz]

Alright, thanks for the quick reply and the advice!