Twitter Ruby Gem Too many requests

Question

I'm currently using TDD with rspec and Ruby on Rails (with twitter gem) to pull tweets and trends for analytics. However, I constantly get Twitter::Error::TooManyRequests and have to sit around twiddling thumbs till I can make another request. Is this a limitation of Twitter search API or am I doing something wrong?

Right now I have a simple index page that invokes Twitter.config once and follows it with Twitter.trends once. Running rspec spec on this to generate one index page results in the previously mentioned error. Am I missing something here? I can't find anywhere (application, framework, or full traces) where the twitter requests are made in abundance.

I'm not using the stream API just yet because it only provides raw tweets and not trending information.

Twitter certainly does have an API limit, and your tests should not be hitting their API unless they are integration tests. You should really be stubbing out the calls to the API in functional testing. — Michael Papile

spitfire109 spitfire109 · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-15T01:18:38

Twitter has a rate limit of something like 150 requests when not authenticated and 250 requests for authenticated users. Perhaps you could figure a way to gather your data in chunks instead of constant calls.

Twitter Ruby Gem Too many requests

2 Answers