Confused about POST limit rates

dromard_jb · 2014-09-23T17:18:49.865Z

I have an app that sends a series of tweets to another twitter account. It’s not clear to me if I am hitting the posting restrictions for applications, or for me as the user.

For example, I posted series of 45 tweets (every 2 seconds), and they all posted. Then a little while later (I waited 15 minutes) I couldn’t post 2 tweets. I assumed I hit the posting limit.

It seems like once I hit this posting limit, I’m not able to post with any more consistency for some time. Since my goal is to emulate a volume of Tweets to the receiving account, how can I balance that volume against the rate limits?

I’m using OAuth, and Tweepy.

isaach · 2014-09-23T18:39:57.717Z

What do you mean “I couldn’t post 2 tweets”? Was there an error message? What did it say?

dromard_jb · 2014-09-23T19:15:21.831Z

No error was provided. I went to the web page for my user and could post from there, but if I posted from the app, I received no feedback, and the receiving account didn’t get the two tweets. I do get standard error messages in general, but not in this case.

Book20Olson · 2014-09-23T19:30:54.326Z

This ca be hard to figure out although there may be a problem with the software your using there may also be a problem with the hitting the keys too much to send too many things or there may be a problem with your awareness of the capabilities of the software. This is hard to determine without actually being there. Although the possibilities are that you may have to look at the software and how to use it better.

dromard_jb · 2014-09-23T20:06:18.869Z

I’m just using Python and Tweepy (a Twitter package for Python). It’s a simple app that takes a list of items then tweets them to a specific Twitter account. ie @‘handle’ Rush Tom Sawyer, then waits 2 seconds to send the next tweet.

isaach · 2014-09-23T20:35:55.780Z

Can you post the code which you think should be posting tweets but isn’t?

dromard_jb · 2014-09-23T23:42:04.262Z

I located the issue. I was caching tweets to avoid Rate Limits, but erroneously wrote my code in a way that I was over-writing the cache. Those extra tweets were getting lost. I think it’s safe to close this issue.

andypiper · 2014-09-24T08:17:50.560Z

andypiper · 2014-09-24T08:19:13.108Z

For reference, the limits on posting status updates are described in this Support article. Glad to hear you’ve got your code sorted now.