modifying rate limits under serious load

[Raffi Krikorian]

hi everyone,

as you all know, Twitter has been faced with considerable capacity problems in recent weeks. we have many efforts under way to expand capacity and more efficiently use the capacity we have. starting today, we're going to begin adjusting rate limits dynamically under load in order to maintain an awesome experience for as many users as possible.

today, we're experimenting with moving rate limits for all clients to varying amounts during periods of high load. you might see rate limits change from the default of 350 calls / hour.  you may even see different values as we monitor the effect these changes have on overall Twitter performance.

this means that it's more important than ever for client applications to monitor their rate limits through the HTTP headers and account/rate_limit_status and adjust your client's behavior accordingly.  we're happy to help you achieve that, and please reach out to us if you need that help (either through this mailing list, or through @twitterapi).

we understand that this might cause some issues in some clients, and will certainly impact the amount of requests your users can make to Twitter. however, the entire ecosystem will be more performant and you will see fewer whales on write operations (like posting tweets).

thank you everyone for your continued patience.

--
Raffi Krikorian
Twitter Platform Team
http://twitter.com/raffi

[Lucas Vickers]

Could you give more information on how you would lower a specific
user's limits?

For example my client does the following, this is of course simplified

api_requests_left = 0;

loop {
if(api_requests_left == 0) { update_request_limits(); } // hit your
server and ask my remaining limit, sleep and wait if needed
make_request;
-- api_requests_left;
}

I see two cases I need to figure out:
4pm. Twitter tells me I have 100 requests left. Request limit renews
at 5pm.
- Will you ever lower my request limit between 4 and 5pm, or can I
assume what I was told was good for a full hour?
- If I use none of my requests between 4pm and 5pm, is there a chance
my new request limit will be lowered, or will you still honor my 100
remaining requests even if at 5pm you lower your limit to 50/hour?

thanks

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Quoting Raffi Krikorian <ra...@twitter.com>:

And many, many thanks to Twitter for doing this! I've been wanting
something like this for a long time. Any chance this could get
extended to the Search API? Right now, there's little we can do except
manually tune around the "Enhance your calm" messages.
>

[Worth]

So what is going to be the time periods between changes. Is going to
be changed by the day,hour, minute? cause it can change like every 2
minutes it would be hard to tell a client that they had 50 more calls
one minute and 0 the next. And what is going to be our interval of
change at minimum developers could be limited to 150 calls and maximum
350. Is it possible we could get less then 150 calls/hour?

[think0rdie]

if it means you won't expand Twitter's capacity itself,
moving rate limits for all clients is simply a bad news for us, end
users.
in effect, today I've got more API errors on HootSuite than ever.
in other words, Twitter experience simply has become worse.

[Rich]

Well I've seen my rate limit has dropped to 175 calls per hour now

On Jun 24, 4:16 am, think0rdie <mxe02...@gmail.com> wrote:
> if it means you won't expand Twitter's capacity itself,

> movingratelimits for all clients is simply a bad news for us, end