[twitter-dev] Rate Limiting question
Hi all, I was feeling a little clever after working on some Twitter API stuff but then thought oh! I'd better think about Twitters rate limiting...and then that's where my brain started to melt! A few bits of info: my web app needs people to authenticate (OAUTH) and, from then on, the app analyses their tweets and occasionally updates registered user's statuses. I've applied for the webserver IP to be white listed which I believe gives the app 20,000 requests per hour. I've not found the search API to be great when looking for a hashtag (sometimes tweets just don't seem to get indexed) so I've gone a stage further and am analysing the individual timelines of all my registered users via a cron job (the cron job sucks in all of a persons tweets greater than the last analysed tweet of the user). This call is made via OAUTH/authenticated so I believe such a call depletes the user's rate limit quota rather than the IP/authenticated account of the webserver quota? Is that correct? Thanks for any thoughts here Joel
Re: [twitter-dev] Rate Limiting question
For the first use case, following many users' timelines, you should be using the follow method on the Streaming API. Currently you cannot get protected and low quality user statuses this way, but you can get the vast majority of tweets this way. Until we support these corner cases, you can fall back to the REST API for protected users. For automated hashtag searching, you should also be using the Streaming API. The track feature will give you all hashtags search for up to a fairly generous proportion of the total stream of tweets. -John Kalucki http://twitter.com/jkalucki Services, Twitter Inc. On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 2:43 PM, jojet j...@jojet.com wrote: Hi all, I was feeling a little clever after working on some Twitter API stuff but then thought oh! I'd better think about Twitters rate limiting...and then that's where my brain started to melt! A few bits of info: my web app needs people to authenticate (OAUTH) and, from then on, the app analyses their tweets and occasionally updates registered user's statuses. I've applied for the webserver IP to be white listed which I believe gives the app 20,000 requests per hour. I've not found the search API to be great when looking for a hashtag (sometimes tweets just don't seem to get indexed) so I've gone a stage further and am analysing the individual timelines of all my registered users via a cron job (the cron job sucks in all of a persons tweets greater than the last analysed tweet of the user). This call is made via OAUTH/authenticated so I believe such a call depletes the user's rate limit quota rather than the IP/authenticated account of the webserver quota? Is that correct? Thanks for any thoughts here Joel
[twitter-dev] Rate Limiting Question
From the Rate Limiting documentation: IP whitelisting takes precedence to account rate limits. GET requests from a whitelisted IP address made on a user's behalf will be deducted from the whitelisted IP's limit, not the users. Therefore, IP-based whitelisting is a best practice for applications that request many users' data. Say for example I wanted to simply replicate the twitter website. One page per user that just monitors for new statuses with authenticated (to catch protected users) calls to http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.json Say I was very popular and had 20k people on the site. Would this limit me to 1 call per minute per user or would it fall over to the user limit of 150 an hour once I hit my 20k? If so how can I tell it has fallen over besides for simply keeping track of the number of calls per hour my server has made. Thanks -Bob
