There are a lot of messages and details around saying that the REST API is 150 per hour, with whitelisting up to 20k per hour. The Search API is "more than" the 150, but no specifics.
>> Note that the Search API is not limited by the same 150 requests per hour >> limit as the REST API. >> The number is quite a bit higher and we feel it is both liberal and >> sufficient for most applications. My question is this, I have just soft launched www.twitparade.co.uk, and although the site is in early days, a lot of work is in the scheduler that grabs, stores and publishes individual tweets. The way I am doing it is as follows: 1. Load a list of people in a specific time slice to check 2. Loop through each person on list, pausing for 5 seconds after each person (except the last) 3. Pause for 20 seconds at the end of the list 4. Pick up the next time slice and start again The time slicing allows me to prioritise the people how have tweeted more recently, by checking them more frequently. With the pauses I am currently using, assuming each search is instant, then in any 1 minute, I am carrying out a maximum of 12 searches, equating to 720 an hour. If the minute spans a list change, then there is a 20 second pause, so I would only carry out 8 searches, equating to 480 an hour. This can mean that it takes 20 minutes for some Tweets to be picked up, if that person hasn't tweeted for a while (as I check them less often) - I would like to improve that. The gatherer is desktop application, so doesn't have a referrer, but I have set the User-Agent to list my app name and the URL of the final site that the data is gathered for, so hopefully Twitter can ID my app (aside: How can we tell that our User-Agent makes it through?). I am also on a fixed IP address, so should be identifiable to the back-end systems at Twitter's end. So how aggressive with cutting my pauses can I be? The Search API numbers are not publicized so I have no idea if I'm knocking on the limits, or whether I can with much lower pauses. If I cut step 2 down to 1 and step 3 to 5 seconds, then my max rate would be 60 per minute = 3600 per hour, or 2700 per hour. Is this within the unknown limits? If someone from Twitter could confirm/deny that my use of caching, user-agent and shorter pauses all works together, I'd appreciate it. Thanks, Steve -- Quick Web Ltd UK
