A rate should almost never be hard-coded anymore and all bots and maintenance tasks should use the maxlag parameter: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Maxlag_parameter. This allows them to make requests as quickly as they like when the servers have resources to spare, and forces them to back off when they don't. This has been the default behavior for Pywikipediabot and most other major bot frameworks for some time.
Cheers! -Madman
On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 12:17 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Hi.
I occasionally get asked about what a reasonable rate for querying the API of a Wikimedia wiki is for a particular script or tool. I don't really know the answer other than "be reasonable" and "specify an informative User-Agent." That's essentially what I said when asked here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tech&diff=3569658&oldid...
If there's an authoritative answer (on Meta-Wiki or mediawiki.org or even wikitech), that'd obviously be ideal. I'd also settle for a mailing list post. I looked at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page to see if it mentioned "limit" or "rate", but nothing came up. It's a fairly common question; it should probably be a bit easier to find.
MZMcBride
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