Please clarify rate limits

[AuerbachJoel]

I have pored over the docs and I still do not understand the rate limit policies. I currently have Premium Sandbox access, which limits me to 250 30-day requests and 50 full-archive requests per period. What I want to know is:

1. Does the period reset at the beginning of each calendar month, or 30 days from first use?

2. My understanding is that 1 request is, e.g., a single GET call made to the API. What is the actual limit to the number of tweets I can retrieve with a single request? This makes me think that I can only return 100, and must then make separate requests for subsequent pages. However, I have been able to return 1000 tweets at one go without issue.

3. After seeing that I could retrieve that many at once, I set maxResults to 1 million and made a GET request to the full-archive endpoint in order to test how many results it would let me retrieve. However, this resulted in apparently using up all of my requests for the period, which makes zero sense on my understanding above. In fact, the dashboard shows that I am now over the limit of requests I am allowed to make (71/50)! How in the world does this make sense? There is no way I made even 50 requests if I understand what that means correctly.

UPDATE: apparently setting maxResults to 1000 counts as 10 requests. This probably does explain what happened in #3, but makes no sense from an API perspective. A max should be a max, no? Precisely to avoid this kind of thing?

[happycamper]

Hi @AuerbachJoel

Sorry for the confusion, note that there are two different things that you might be confusing:

–max-results 1000 \ (this is the number of Tweets desired from the full result, and can roughly be divided by the results-per-call to get total number of requests needed to page through the results in reverse chronological order.)

–results-per-call 100 \ ( this is either 100 for sandbox, or 500 for paid tiers)

1. The period is a UTC time period from 201801010000 (inclusive) - 201802010000

2. The request is a single call to return either up to 100 tweets (on sandbox) or up to 500 tweets (on paid tiers). NOTE: all pagination requests count as requests, I recommend sets the maxResults parameter (this is per page) to either 100 or 500 depending on tier, there is no advantage to setting this any differently.

3. If you put in the max-results of tweets requests using the search tool, the tool will page through all results (at the results-per-call per page) until all results are returned.

Results are returned at either maxResults per page or up to 31 days per page, whichever is reached in the results configuration first.