Impossible to not get rate limited when getting friends

billychasen · 2013-05-14T22:50:12.000Z

I am trying to show a user detailed information about all the people they follow.

friends/list is exactly what we need, but has a very low limit at 20 users per request. A user needs to follow just 300 friends before this gets throttled.

so instead, you can get friends/ids and cross that with users/lookup, which increases reach to 1500 friends before failing (and then also chews up your api rate limiting for other calls)

these rate limits make it very hard to show a user results when requested and then performing an action

episod · 2013-05-15T15:07:34.000Z

For some users you’ll be able to complete these tasks within a single rate limit window. For other users you’ll just have to span over the course of multiple rate limit windows. It’s highly recommended to use the friends/ids -> users/lookup pattern, as you can cache results for users you’ve already looked up.