API rate limit?

Discussion:

API rate limit?

akshayjava

2008-03-03 19:52:00 UTC

Hi Yahoos!

I have a quick question regarding the del.icio.us API rate limit. Can
someone please let me know what is the rate limit for del.icio.us API
usage? I've hit

"ERROR 999: Unable to process request at this time -- error 999"

And I am not sure if this is because of some server issues or due to
reaching the rate limit.

Thanks for your help
Akshay

Toby Elliott

2008-03-03 19:58:00 UTC

Permalink

Thanks for your question. This result means that you've hit the rate
limit. I can't give you exact numbers, as it depends on your usage,
but I will say that if you are using posts/all much at all it is
likely to start blocking quickly.

If you were hitting us fairly hard, it's a sign that you should back
off for a while, then hit us less hard when you resume. If you
weren't, it may be a problem with your ISP using the same connection
for multiple users, and someone else on it abusing us, in which case
you should notify your ISP.

Regards,
Toby Elliott
del.icio.us

Post by akshayjava
Hi Yahoos!
I have a quick question regarding the del.icio.us API rate limit. Can
someone please let me know what is the rate limit for del.icio.us API
usage? I've hit
"ERROR 999: Unable to process request at this time -- error 999"
And I am not sure if this is because of some server issues or due to
reaching the rate limit.
Thanks for your help
Akshay

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Akshay Java

2008-03-03 20:17:43 UTC

Permalink

Hi Toby

Thanks for your feedback. I am trying to collect del.icio.us tag data for a
research project as part of my dissertation.

I have a set of 30k URLs for which I would like to fetch the commonly used
tags. I am using the JSON API for this purpose.

I understand the reason for blocking too many requests from a single IP and
will space out my requests to Yahoo Servers (would 1 per 10 secs be OK?).
However, I believe that the limit might still be around 5000 requests over
24 hours. Is there any possibility to request for an increase in rate limit
for research purpose?

I would really appreciate any help in this regard.
Thanks
Akshay

Post by Toby Elliott
Thanks for your question. This result means that you've hit the rate
limit. I can't give you exact numbers, as it depends on your usage,
but I will say that if you are using posts/all much at all it is
likely to start blocking quickly.
If you were hitting us fairly hard, it's a sign that you should back
off for a while, then hit us less hard when you resume. If you
weren't, it may be a problem with your ISP using the same connection
for multiple users, and someone else on it abusing us, in which case
you should notify your ISP.
Regards,
Toby Elliott
del.icio.us

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Stephane Bortzmeyer

2008-03-05 12:21:31 UTC

Permalink

On Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 07:52:00PM -0000,

Post by akshayjava
I have a quick question regarding the del.icio.us API rate
limit. Can someone please let me know what is the rate limit for
del.icio.us API usage?

Apparently, del.icio.us does not use the Retry-After of HTTP. Wouldn't
it be a good idea?

The HTTP standard, RFC 2616, says:

14.37 Retry-After

The Retry-After response-header field can be used with a 503 (Service
Unavailable) response to indicate how long the service is expected to
be unavailable to the requesting client. This field MAY also be used
with any 3xx (Redirection) response to indicate the minimum time the
user-agent is asked wait before issuing the redirected request. The
value of this field can be either an HTTP-date or an integer number
of seconds (in decimal) after the time of the response.

Retry-After = "Retry-After" ":" ( HTTP-date | delta-seconds )

Two examples of its use are

Retry-After: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 23:59:59 GMT
Retry-After: 120

In the latter example, the delay is 2 minutes.

Currently, the response only includes:

HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:20:50 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1