Specific API Implementation Instructions ...

[Scott C. Lemon]

Chad/Ryan,

Thanks for all of the updates so far ... I'm actually jealous that you
get to really know what it's like to deal with a DDOS attack of these
proportions. Having been involved in the past with some large scale
DDOS attacks (where the FBI and Government even got involved) I know
that it is quite a learning experience, and something that very few
people can understand or grasp. It's all towards making a better
service!

As Jesse suggested, in the mean time, you have given me time to re-
evaluate my twitter libraries, and the various code paths to try and
make my software more compliant, and able to deal with the situation
automatically. Last night was a fun code fest rewriting a lot, and I
think that I have now got a much more robust lib to honor the various
headers and return codes.

I do have a question for you in the short term ... and it's related to
my whitelisted IPs.

I noticed when things went down hill, that my main application threads
were being killed by the 150 rate limit. I rewrote all of my logic to
deal with this, but have found a strange situation, and want to know
how my code ought to deal with this.

I am now closely monitoring the headers to throttle based on the X-
RateLimit-Limit: header. BUT ... I noticed that right now I'm being
told my limit is 20,000 ... with all of them left. When I run my
script, after about 150 calls this drops to 150 and I'm blocked for
hours ... and then I see it kick back up to 20,000.

Now when I get an HTTP 400 return code with the rate limit error, my
lib will throttle back using 25 second to 1 minute delays ... but what
I don't get is how you really want my library to respect these
values? Right now it appears that all of the return headers are
telling me 20,000 again ... and I'm guessing that (for the fourth
time) if my script takes off and gets going it'll get blacklisted
again very quickly.

So, besides the 302 following, is there something specific that you
want me (us) to do with respect to rate limits? Is it ok to run our
scripts - hard coded - as some *slower* rate that is acceptable to you
- ignoring the rate limit headers? If so ... what is that rate?

Also ... when I get back a 400 error that I exceeded the rate limit it
appeared that I had to stop *all* requests for an hour or so until I
saw the rate limit jump back up to 20,000 before I could restart.

Anyhow ... please let me know what you suggest ... I'd be more than
willing to update my code to honor your requests, and I'll even see
about dropping my PHP code example out on a page somewhere if it's a
benefit to others.

[Ryan Sarver]

Scott,

You *should* be getting the proper rate limits. Things have changed in the last 30 minutes or so, so be sure to check again and let us know if you still seeing the variable throttling.

Best, Ryan

[Scott C. Lemon]

Ryan,

Does this mean that I'll see 150 *or* 20000? Or is there a situation
where I would see anything in between? Or some other value?

I'm wanting to ensure that I enhance my library to handle the various
numbers that might be coming back to me.


Scott

On Aug 9, 2:45 pm, Ryan Sarver <rsar...@twitter.com> wrote:
> Scott,
>
> You *should* be getting the proper rate limits. Things have changed in the
> last 30 minutes or so, so be sure to check again and let us know if you
> still seeing the variable throttling.
>
> Best, Ryan
>

[Scott C. Lemon]

Ryan/Chad,

Two more questions related to good API usage practices ...

1. When i am seeing a http error 502, it *seems* to always be the
"Twitter is over capacity!" error. Are their any other times when I
should expect to see the 502 error?

2. When I *do* get a 502, how long do you want me to backoff? How
long should I wait before retrying?

Scott


On Aug 9, 2:45 pm, Ryan Sarver <rsar...@twitter.com> wrote:

> Scott,
>
> You *should* be getting the proper rate limits. Things have changed in the
> last 30 minutes or so, so be sure to check again and let us know if you
> still seeing the variable throttling.
>
> Best, Ryan
>