Hello, On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 8:53 PM, jmathai <[email protected]> wrote: > > Why are 400, 403 and 503 valid response codes to signify that a call > is being rate limited? Was there a dart board involved?
I don't know, but it would be really hard to play 301 with that dartboard. > > * 400 Bad Request: The request was invalid. An accompanying error > message will explain why. This is the status code will be returned > during rate limiting. This is for hourly rate limits for GET requests. 150 req/hr for the normal case (20k req/hr for whitelist). > * 403 Forbidden: The request is understood, but it has been > refused. An accompanying error message will explain why. This code is > used when requests are being denied due to update limits. This is for daily update limits (POST requests: sending tweets and DMs, following people, etc). > * 503 Service Unavailable: The Twitter servers are up, but > overloaded with requests. Try again later. The search and trend > methods use this to indicate when you are being rate limited. This is a hold-over from when Twitter Search was Summize. I expect if/when the Search and REST APIs merge into a single API that this rate-limit code will be 400 instead. -Chad
