Counter for rate limit remaining requests unreliable, often reaches 0 unduly

[Reivax]

I'm having this problem for a few days, and I've been monitoring ALL
requests sent to twitter, here is what I saw :
The value of the X-RateLimit-Remaining header is totally unreliable.
For instance, the response to a request will have it at 120, while the
next response will have it at 40.
Then subsequent request responses will have values such as 118, 39,
37, 36, 117, ... and so on.

All responses have the same X-RateLimit-Reset !

It all looks like there are 2 unsynchronized counters, and responses
get values from either one of them...

The trouble is that one counter reaches 0 much too early, which makes
my twitter client says the maximum allowed request has been reached !!

I make 3 requests every 2 minutes, so I should never reach the max.

I have the exact same behavior when using the rate_limit_status
request.

I made sure I have no other client on that account, and I can
reproduce the problem each time. Even if I had, there would not be
cases where it goes from 36 to 117 for 2 adjacent requests...

Thanks for looking into that !
(I can provide traces of the requests)

Regards,
Xavier

[fbparis]

According to the last api request you've done, X-RateLimit-Remaining
can be user limit or IP limit (depends if you made an authentified
request or not).

This can explain the X-RateLimit-Remaining values you've posted.

[Reivax]

All requests are done authentified.

Thanks
Xavier

[Reivax]

I wish someone could just check this matter.
I can provide an XML file showing all ordered requests (with all
params, responses, etc) with the dumb counter values showing up.

Thanks
Xavier

[Richard]

I've seen many many reports of this coming in to TweetDeck support.
Rate limit exceeded when it's not really.

[Reivax]

Hey Richard,

If you get a chance to put a proxy to display all requests going out
of TweetDeck, you'll easily see that 'remaining' counters sent back by
twitter go wild often enough.

Chances are TweetDeck users blame it on TweetDeck :(

Thanks for your feedback, let's hope that will help make twitter dev
team work on that critical issue


Xavier