Avoiding Rate Limiting

[pi_count]

I run a little tool for prediction markets (picount.com) that uses the twitter API to get the current “statuses_count” from three twitter profiles. During traffic spikes, this call will often fail and just return a blank value. When it happened this morning there were about 120 people on site hitting refresh, am I just getting rate limited? If so, what do I do to prevent this?

Is this what the Streaming API is for? Do I need to switch from a client-initiated query to a chron job that just puts these statuses_count numbers to a database that I can then read from?

[andypiper]

I suggest that caching is a useful way to handle this. The streaming API will provide real-time Tweet delivery but will not easily let you check for user object status_count values.

[pi_count]

thanks for the suggestion Andy I will look into that