The Movie Database Support
Support → API Support
Please define "unreasonable amount of bandwidth"
posted by angelxmorenoSTAFFMOD on March 4, 2013 at 3:15 AM
int the Terms of Use of the API in section 1.B.ii it states that I should not "Use (or create applications that use) an unreasonable amount of bandwidth". Since you guys are awesome and I don't want to make anyone upset ( or lose my API key, lol ), please let me know how much is unreasonable? 10,000 a day? 5 calls a second?
Until the new changes for the API are implemented I'd like to perform a query similar to what i suggested in http://www.themoviedb.org/talk/5132a985760ee3623659e2f5 But I am afraid I'll get shun by the TMDB API team.
Reply by Travis Bell
on March 4, 2013 at 10:06 AM
Hi angelxmoreno ,
We don't really care as long as you aren't tripping over the request rate limiting (I just moved the information about this on to the main docs, you can read it there).
The clause you mention here was put in before we had rate limiting as a precautionary measure to ensure we had a legal means to enforce usage. Since we have rate limiting in place now, the rate limits are basically what we consider to be reasonable.
Reply by Mikez
on March 8, 2013 at 8:30 PM
A quick question to you Travis: I am currently dumping the database. Each time I make a movie request, If the movie id is a valid tmdb id, I make a request to movie cast and then for each cast and crew member, I make a person request plus company, keyword + trailer requests. Then the loop sleeps for 10 seconds before making an another call. So the number of requests/10 seconds really depends on how big the movie cast and crew is. I might break the 10 seconds rule with a couple of extra requests from movie to movie. Is this a problem?
I have done 2900 API requests the past hour.
Reply by Travis Bell
on March 8, 2013 at 10:49 PM
Take a look at using the
append_to_responseparameter. You'll cut your requests down by a significant amount, in the movie example by 1/5.