I think the number of "So how does whitelisting really work?" threads that have taken place, and continue to take place on this list indicate a lack of clarity in documentation. Perhaps someone from Twitter can take the task of updating the rate limiting docs to more explicitly spell out how it actually works?
Boaz - as the thread Srikanth referenced states, official word from Twitter is that you get 20,000 calls per hour *per user* from your whitelisted IP. (Of course, it's not that cut and dried - POSTs are different than GETs are different than searches, but in a nutshell you can expect to make 20,000 authenticated GETs per user per hour regardless of how many simultaneous users are on your site if your IP is whitelisted; they're not all sharing a single pool of 20,000 requests.) I'll leave it to you to decide if you need that or not. Most apps that are just acting as a client probably don't, but there are some edge cases where it's useful. For a long time I had no intentions of having Ambeur whitelisted, but now there's a feature I want to offer my users that I'll need it for, so I've applied. And no, I'm not telling you what the feature is. ;) On Aug 16, 1:22 pm, srikanth reddy <srikanth.yara...@gmail.com> wrote: > http://groups.google.co.in/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thre... > > On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 7:37 PM, Sam Street <sam...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Necessary, for example, if you use a particular account to notify your > > users of a certain event (sending them notifications). Large apps with > > high traffic might need to send over 150 alerts from the bot account > > per hour. > > > Im thinking it's also used for apps that try to deliver tweets in > > 'realtime' by requesting the REST API very frequently rather than use > > the streaming APIs. > > > Perhaps it's also used to make multiple requests to /users/show via a > > cronjob that makes sure all the user's of the site have an up to date > > profile image and background image cached. (If a user changes their > > profile picture on Twitter, your cached URL 404's) > > > Anyway I've only used whitelisting for the first (notifying users when > > they are tagged into photos - or when they are invited to events on > > twappening.com) > > > -Sam @sampiclihttp://twicli.com > > > On Aug 16, 12:16 pm, boaz <sapirb...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Hello, > > > > I am new to Twitter API and I am trying to understand whether I should > > > apply for whitelisting my application. The documentation says: > > > "IP whitelisting takes precedence to account rate limits. GET requests > > > from a whitelisted IP address made on a user's behalf will be deducted > > > from the whitelisted IP's limit, not the users. Therefore, IP-based > > > whitelisting is a best practice for applications that request many > > > users' data." > > > However if for example 200 users are accessing twitter through my > > > application in one hour, and each access from my app to twitter is > > > done with the relevant end user as the twitter authenticated user, I > > > can do 200*150=30000 API calls in one hours without whitelisting the > > > IP address, which is more than the 20000 I could do with whitelisting. > > > Can anyone give a counter example where whitelisting is absolutely > > > necessary? > > > > Thank you, > > > Boaz
