Request Rate Limiting


We do enforce a small amount of rate limiting. Our current limits are 40 requests every 10 seconds and are limited by IP address, not API key. You can think of this is being burstable to 40 in a single second, or as an average of 4 requests/second. The timer will reset 10 seconds from your first request within the current 10 second "bucket". This means that if you trigger the limit you will have to wait up to 9 seconds before the timer resets but depending where you are within the 10 second window, it could be the very next second.


You can use the X-RateLimit headers that get returned with every request to keep track of your current limits. If you exceed the limit, you will receive a 429 HTTP status with a Retry-After header. As soon your cool down period expires, you are free to continue making requests.


Here's an example of what the headers look like on a rate limited request:


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Expose-Headers: ETag, X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining, X-RateLimit-Reset, Retry-After
Cache-Control: public, max-age=28800
Content-Length: 1339
Content-Type: application/json;charset=utf-8
Date: Wed, 03 May 2017 15:57:05 GMT
ETag: "a2f04167b75be463e8c30b93b473aed1"
Server: openresty
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Memc: HIT
X-Memc-Age: 25954
X-Memc-Expires: 2846
X-Memc-Key: a7a8be33582080c3e162cfcb93607b73
X-RateLimit-Limit: 40
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 32
X-RateLimit-Reset: 1493827035
Connection: keep-alive