Twitter rate limit?

Question

So I'm aware that twitter has a rate limit of 150 requests per hour. But for some reason I keep getting the error from twitter that I have reached my rate limit, which is impossible considering the amount of times I accessed it.

I started monitoring the changes in hits left per hour, and realized that it decreases to 0 within half an hour or so. At that point I thought the problem is with my website not having a dedicated ip, so I requested this change to be made with my hosting company.

However even after my website has moved to a dedicated ip the remaining hits per hour still decreases at the same rate without me using it.. I honestly have no idea why this is happening.

And an interesting thing: I tried using the javascript code supplied by: http://code.google.com/p/twitterjs/ and found that even after the limit reached 0, it still seems to be able to load tweets.

Anyone know why this is happening?

Test page I was working on: http://ice3studio.com/twitterTesting/ - 1st section in the white box is js with php caching (which cannot grab twitter feed after limit is reached) - 2nd section is the js code from google code

I am very new at this so I appreciate any help! Thanks in advance :D

Answer 1

If the GET request is authenticated then rate limit applies to the user otherwise its the IP. Only GET request has rate limit. POST request has no rate limit.

Twitter JS can load tweets because its running on clients end and every client has different IP. If you use this library with a same account it'll be rate limited as you are sending authenticated request.

You can always white list your IP and account. It'll increase your rate limit greatly.