I have a large number of twitter users I wish to sydicate onto a website using PHP and caching the tweets in MySQL. However I seem to be stumped by the rate-limit problem when ever I access the API. Every request I make to every user seems to count as a request, which stands to reason.
I notice other sites* doing this exact thing successfully. How are they getting around this, are they simply whitelisted, or is there a technique I'm missing?
*http://www.twackle.com/NFL/Aaron-Rodgers_1/tweets
The streaming API is what you are looking for, and more specifically, the filter method. Filter, at its least-privileged level, will allow you to follow 5,000 users in realtime, without them having to authorize your app, and you can track up to 400 keywords using this method as well.
Now, if you want historical tweets as well, you will have to pull those from the REST API (the streaming API's count parameter doesn't really help here), but since you can only retrieve the last 3200 tweets for a user via the REST API, you can pretty much backfill all available tweet history with 16 calls to statuses/user_timeline by passing in a count parameter value of 200 and paging accordingly.
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=barackobama&count=200&page=2
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=barackobama&count=200&page=3
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=barackobama&count=200&page=4
With your 350 calls per hour per single Twitter account, you could backfill approximately 22 full user timelines per hour.
On the implementation side, you'd probably be interested in Phirehose, a streaming API client interface for PHP.
try to auth first, before get the tweets. that should increase the rate limit
A simple method of combining multiple user_timelines is to create a Twitter list and use GET /:user/lists/:id/status. That single API request will return the most recent tweets from all users on the list.
Related
Our site uses our own comment system (simple php/mysql) and also the fb comment plugin. I would like to be able to add the comment counts of each to display a single total count of comments from both together. Seems simple enough.
Months ago, I got this working. Then it suddenly stopped working. This morning, I found a new way to do it. Got it working on one page, and by the time I had added the code to all the pages on which we have comments, it was no longer working.
I am pulling my hair out trying to get this working, having virtually zero understanding of json. The FB API explorer gives me an error about auth tokens, but doing what I see recommended has no effect (i.e. creating a new fb app and including the block of auth code they provide).
This is what was working fine at first this am:
$fbcounturl = 'http://www.catalystathletics.com/articles/article.php?articleID=1902';
$fbjsonurl = "https://graph.facebook.com/v2.1/?fields=share{comment_count}&id=" .$fbcounturl;
$fbdata = file_get_contents($fbjsonurl);
$fbarray = json_decode($fbdata, true);
$fbcomcount = $fbarray['share']['comment_count'];
print($fbcomcount);
Then I could simply add $fbcomcount to the $comCount from our db.
If I just browse to the url, I get the json info fine:
{
"share": {
"comment_count": 3
},
"id": "http://www.catalystathletics.com/articles/article.php?articleID=1902"
}
But the $fbcomcount is empty.
Here is an example of a page that would use this -
http://www.catalystathletics.com/article/1902/Jumping-Forward-in-the-Snatch-or-Clean-Error-Correction/#comments
Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.
Ran into the same issue recently, Facebook comment count simply stopped working. Eventually tracked down the error in the returned JSOn response, telling me Error #4 Application request limit reached
{"error":{"message":"(#4) Application request limit
reached","type":"OAuthException","is_transient":true,"code":4,"fbtrace_id":"EUNAVRNgnFu"}}`
Here is a good, detailed response on Facebook Open Graph API limits I found elsewhere:
The Facebook API limit isn't really documented, but apparently it's something like: 600 calls per 600 seconds, per token & per IP. As the site is restricted, quoting the relevant part:
After some testing and discussion with the Facebook platform team, there is no official limit I'm aware of or can find in the documentation. However, I've found 600 calls per 600 seconds, per token & per IP to be about where they stop you. I've also seen some application based rate limiting but don't have any numbers.
As a general rule, one call per second should not get rate limited. On the surface this seems very restrictive but remember you can batch certain calls and use the subscription API to get changes.
As you can access the Graph API on the client side via the Javascript SDK; I think if you travel your request for photos from the client, you won't hit any application limit as it's the user (each one with unique id) who's fetching data, not your application server (unique ID).
This may mean a huge refactor if everything you do go through a server. But it seems like the best solution if you have so many request (as it'll give a breath to your server).
Else, you can try batch request, but I guess you're already going this way if you have big traffic.
If nothing of this works, according to the Facebook Platform Policy you should contact them.
If you exceed, or plan to exceed, any of the following thresholds please contact us as you may be subject to additional terms: (>5M MAU) or (>100M API calls per day) or (>50M impressions per day).
I apologize in advance for my English.
I need to get the last tweets about a specific subject (for example.. well.. Twitter!).
Today, i use https://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=twitter to obtain that.
But as you know this is deprecated and it will shutdown. So i try to use the 1.1 API with PHP (twitteroauth) but i have this issue:
Every visitors of my website get the last twitter statuses about a subject with AJAX. If the visitor stay in my page, the twitter data will be refreshing all 10 seconds.
EDIT : Please note that i have a big amount of pages and the subject is different in every of them.
Today, the majority of my visitors are not authenticated by my website, and by twitter.
If i use the PHP-way to get data and display to my visitors, i will be rate limited if the amount of my visitors are too high. There is my questions:
There is a way to build some "anonymous" token with my secret keys to "delegate" the rate limit window to my "anonymous" user?
If not, my use of the API 1.1 are realistic? How?
And, if not again, what is your recommandation, your advice to solve this?
Thank you very much for the enlightenment!
I decided to use the streaming APIs with PHP CURL with AJAX to get my data.
I am writing a PHP-based application using the Twitter API. Up until now I've been using the REST API via a GET request on a PHP page. However, as my app scales, I can easily see it going over the 150 requests-per-hour limit. Here's why:
I have categories of topics, each which periodically poll the Twitter API for tweets around a topic. For example, I have: mysite.com/cars, mysite.com/trucks, etc. A user can go to either page. When he is on the page, live, refreshing updates are pulled from Twitter by making an AJAX call to a PHP page I've set up. The PHP page determines which category the user is coming from (cars, trucks), polls Twitter for search results, then returns the JSON to the category page. This sounds confusing, but there are a number of unrelated reasons I need to have the intermediate PHP page.
The problem is that since the PHP page is making the requests, it will eat up the rate limit very quickly (imagine if there were 20 categories instead of just cars and trucks). I can't make a single call with multiple parameters because it would combine multiple categories of tweets and I'd have no way to separate them. I can cache results, but if I did, the more categories I add, the longer each would have to go between API calls.
So how can I approach this problem? I looked at the streaming API, but it's only for oAuth'd users and I don't want my users to have to log in to anything. Can I use the stream on the PHP page and then just make continuous requests each time the category page polls the PHP page? Thanks for any help!
a) You don't have to use your websites user's oAuth credentials in streaming API - just your's:
get them somewhere in dev.twitter.com and hardcode them. Your users won't know there is any oAuth going on backstage.
b) Don't use anonymous requests (150 per IP per hour) use oAuth requests (350 per oAuth per hour). You don't have to ask your users to sing in - just sign in few (1 is sufficient for start) your private twitter accounts. If you don't like creating twitter login functionality, you can get credentials for your twitter account to your twitter application in dev.twitter.com .
c) As #Cheeso mentioned - cache! Don't let every pageload make twitter request.
I making a php server/page which is supposed to capture a users twitter feed and then provide it in a JSON format to another application and/or mobile device in JSON format.
Twitter provides it's data already in JSON format by using .json after the timeline url. But this is limited to 150 requests/hour which can be a problem being on a shared hosted server.
If been trying to use the twitteroauth php library with API keys. Before I can start communicating with the API I always need to sign in with a twitter account. Using the API is limited to 350 request/hour.
Is there a way to use the library not needing to log in to capture the timeline?
Or what is a better way to achieve my goal, creating a php-page providing me the timeline on request?
If I understand the question correct, the problem is that you make to many request to the Twitter API that doesn't require log on. In that case, if you don't want to use the API that require login, I guess you could implement some caching. Let your server run a cron every minute that check the Twitter API for new tweets, and store the tweets in a database or a textfile.
Then, when a user request your page for JSON, you read from your cache instead of going straight to the Twitter API every time. That way you will save a lot of traffic between your server and Twitter, and you would still be very close to real time when it comes to up-to-date tweets, as you with 150 requests/hour could update your cache every 30 seconds or so.
I'm trying to get facebook's example page working (again) which you can find here. I'm getting the following error:
Fatal error: Uncaught OAuthException: (#4) Application request limit reached thrown in C:\wamp\www\base_facebook.php on line 988
I've googled this and the problem seems to be easily fixed by using the steps outlined here. However, when I go to facebook.com/insights, my application isn't listed (I am logged in).
The weirder part is that when I go to my app via Developers > My apps, I can go to the page of my app and click "Insights". This brings me to the Insights page for my app... but the diagnostic section is nowhere to be found. Can anyone help?
The outlined way of finding out why this happens is:
Log into https://developers.facebook.com/apps/
The last app you've edited should already be loaded on the right side; if not, find your app on the left side and click the name.
Scroll down until you see the Insights section and click See All.
From the menu on the left side, select API > Activity & Errors.
The Facebook "Graph API Rate Limiting" docs says that an error with code #4 is an app level rate limit, which is different than user level rate limits. Although it doesn't give any exact numbers, it describes their app level rate-limit as:
This rate limiting is applied globally at the app level. Ads api calls are excluded.
Rate limiting happens real time on sliding window for past one hour.
Stats is collected for number of calls and queries made, cpu time spent, memory used for each app.
There is a limit for each resource multiplied by monthly active users of a given app.
When the app uses more than its allowed resources the error is thrown.
Error, Code: 4, Message: Application request limit reached
The docs also give recommendations for avoiding the rate limits. For app level limits, they are:
Recommendations:
Verify the error code (4) to confirm the throttling type.
Do not make burst of calls, spread out the calls throughout the day.
Do smart fetching of data (important data, non duplicated data, etc).
Real-time insights, make sure API calls are structured in a way that you can read insights for as many as Page posts as possible, with minimum number of requests.
Don't fetch users feed twice (in the case that two App users have a specific friend in common)
Don't fetch all user's friends feed in a row if the number of friends is more than 250. Separate the fetches over different days. As an option, fetch first the app user's news feed (me/home) in order to detect which friends are more important to the App user. Then, fetch those friends feeds first.
Consider to limit/filter the requests by using the following parameters: "since", "until", "limit"
For page related calls use realtime updates to subscribe to changes in data.
Field expansion allows ton "join" multiple graph queries into a single call.
Etags to check if the data querying has changed since the last check.
For page management developers who does not have massive user base, have the admins of the page to accept the app to increase the number of users.
Finally, the docs give the following informational tips:
Batching calls will not reduce the number of api calls.
Making parallel calls will not reduce the number of api calls.
If you make a GET request to one of FB graph API endpoints that does not require access_token that does not mean you should not include it in request parameter. If you do as FB documentation says as do not include access_token than in FB server side it registers into your server machine. So limit (whatever amount is it exactly) can be reached very easily. If you however, put the user access token into the request (&access_token=XXXXXX) then requests register into the specific user, so the limit hardly ever be reached. You can test it with a simple script that makes 1000 requests with and without user access_token.
NOTE, FB app access token will not be sufficient as you will face the same problem: requests will be registered into app access_token that situation is alike making requests without access_token.