Hi Pete,
Every 5 seconds is well below the rate limit and seems like a good rate for reasonably quick responses. It sounds like you're doing the same query each time so that should be fine.
For people doing requests based on many different queries I recommend that they query less often for searches that have no results than for those that do. By using a back-off you can keep up to date on queries that are hot but not waste cycles requesting queries that very rarely change. Check out the way we do it on search.twitter.com at http://search.twitter.com/javascripts/search/refresher.js
Thanks; — Matt Sanford / @mzsanford On Apr 8, 2009, at 02:30 AM, peterhough wrote:
Hello! I'm developing an application which needs to constantly request a search API result. I'm pushing through a since_id to try to help minimise the load on the servers. My question is, what is the optimum time limit to loop the API requests? My application will need to act upon the result of the search pretty much instantly. I currently have the script requesting a search API result every 5 seconds. Will this hammer your servers too much? Do you know the average time third party clients reload tweets? Are there any guidelines for this? As this would have a factor in when my applications actions are seen and so the need to request a search result refresh Thanks, Pete
