Adding pause in Scrapy spider

Hi I want to create spider that scraps one website a day. I have a spider that scraps all the stuff I need but I need to implement a pause after each article scraped. I have tried threading module and the time module as well but using them doesn't seem to work as I get this response (from only some of the requests):

DEBUG: Retrying <GET https://www.example.com/.../> (failed 1 times): [<twisted.python.failure.Failure twisted.internet.error.ConnectionLost: Connection to the other side was lost in a non-clean fashion: Connection lost.>].

My code looks like this

class AutomatedSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = 'automated'
    allowed_domains = ['example-domain.com']
    start_urls = [
        'https://example.com/page/1/...'
    ]
    pause = threading.Event()
    article_num = 1

    def parse(self, response):
        for page_num in range(1, 26):
            for href in set(response.css(".h-100 a::attr(href)").extract()):
                # extract data from all the articles on current page
                self.pause.wait(5.0) # this causes the response mentioned above
                yield scrapy.Request(href, callback=self.parse_article)
                self.article_num += 1

            # move to next page
            next_page = 'https://www.information-age.com/page/'+str(page_num)+'/...'
            yield scrapy.Request(next_page, callback=self.parse)

    def parse_article(self, response):
        # function to extract desired data from website that is being scraped

Solution

I don't think time.sleep and waits from threading can work well in Scrapy due to its asynchronous way of working. What you can do is the following:

You can put DOWNLOAD_DELAY=5 in settings.py to have a delay of between 2.5 and 7.5 seconds between requests
With RANDOMIZE_DOWNLOAD_DELAY=False it will wait exactly 5 seconds in between.
Setting CONCURRENT_REQUESTS=1 will make sure there's not multiple requests running simultaneously