Authentication question -- am I being locked out?

[mmdanziger]

Hi all,

I am new to pylast and I think I am doing something wrong. I
initiate a session with network=pylast.LastFMNetwork(api_key='...',
api_secret='...') . I'm not doing any scrobbling or other
authentication-requiring activities, I'm mainly just trying to get a
feel for the data and do some sample mapping and calculation of the
network of artists. So I don't need username, password or session
key, right? But after 100 or so api calls, everything basically
freezes. It seems like I'm being "locked out" or something. Am I
missing something here? Should I be authenticating differently? Will
last.fm really not let me get more than a small data sampling at any
given session?

The code that freezes is a loop over the top 50 artists in the US,
recording the top 10 most similar artists to each one, including
playcounts for all mentioned artists. Is this the sort of thing that
gets identified as "spam" by the last.fm filters? If so, is there
some way around it?

Any advice would be welcome. Thanks in advance,

md