On 17.11.2010, 16:39 Raymond wrote:
Hi everyone,
I plan to be making a fair number of read access calls to the Wikipedia API over the next several months and would like to know what the best practices for efficient, fast access that doesn't hog resources. I've found that having a single thread that makes a call and waits for a response before making the next call has been extremely reliable (much more so than basically any other web API I've used before). What I'd like to do make my application multithreaded for reading from the Wikipedia and make simultaneous calls to the Wikipedia (since the speed of my application is limited by the rate at which I can read from the Wikipedia.)
I have the following questions:
- What limits should I observe in terms of number of calls I make per
second
Per Domas, fewer requests with larger limits is better.
and how many calls I should have going simultaneously?
One.
- How would I know when I'm accessing the API too quickly or too
often? I read at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Errors_and_warnings that there is ratelimited error message, but so far, I've not seen that error myself. If I don't get a ratelimited error, does that mean I'm doing ok with respect to being a good API citizen.
Rate limits are for editing and logging in only.
- Even if I am requiring read access, should I identify myself
explicitly to the API by logging in for the read access -- so that I can be contacted should there be a problem?
Logging in can help you to get a higher limit if you're a sysop or bot. However, identifying you with user-agent header is much more important.
- Does it make sense to try to obtain bot privileges (even for read
only access)? My understanding is that bots get access to larger payload in some API calls.
See above. If your bot will generate a significant load, it's always better to consult the sysadmins and the bot approvals group (for English Wikipedia). The more details you provide, the more precise will be the answer.