API limitations, availability and throttling

[Salvatore Iovene]

Hi,

I run AstroBin.com, a popular hosting website for astrophotography.

AstroBin currently does plate-solving by running a local copy of astrometry.net, but I'd like to ease that burden and use the online API.

My questions are:

1. Are there any limitations or throttling for the API requests?

2. Does the service have a good uptime?

3. What would my average waiting time per job, if I submit, say, 200 jobs a day, and they are all blind solves?

Thank you in advance!

Salvatore

[Dustin Lang]

Hi there,

AstroBin looks great.

Currently we have no limits on the API.  API jobs go into the queue along with everything else.  If it gets to be a problem I would guess that we might have "batch mode" API requests that would run at lower priority.

The solving runs on one server (16 cores, 48 GB).  That server has been up for nearly 400 days.  The web frontend runs on another machine, which has been up for 300 days, though I do occasionally bring down the web service for upgrades.  During normal operations it might be 99.9%.  That being said, the web frontend used to run on a different machine until it died, and I think the site was down for a couple of days until we got it moved.

I don't know off-hand how many submissions we get per day, but an extra 200 a day probably doubles it :)  I don't think there is currently usually a wait time; I think jobs are rarely queued up.  I think we run up to 8 or 12 at a time, so if you submit a bunch at once you will just end up waiting for your own jobs.

Thanks for getting in touch.  Please let us know how it goes, or if you need some help.

cheers,
--dustin

[Salvatore Iovene]

Thanks for your reply Dustin.
Basically I just want to make sure I'll not kill your server. It looks
like it won't be an issue though. I'll prototype things and ask again
if I have problems!

Thanks again,
Salvatore.

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--
Salvatore Iovene

Personal website: http://iovene.com/
Founder of AstroBin: http://astrobin.com/

[Dustin Lang]

Thanks for checking!  Please let us know if you have any problems or notice that it is taking a long time.

--dustin