Hello,
I want to ask about the ongoing “issue?” with WoW API’s which causes a lot of the requests to end up with 429 error responses.
After some investigation it seems that the 36k request hourly quota is permanently enforced. My project (and probably some others as I read) for years relied on this rule to be ignored to get the required amount of data. Not by much, but still consistently over the limit.
I read other people suggesting solutions with “keep-alive” or other network changes, but it has no effect. I tried to access API data in several (5+) different programming languages and tools with the same bad result. The easiest way to test is to shut down your API client for couple of hours and start it on a single region (let’s say EU). Until ~36k requests you can hammer the API server at the 100 rq/s limit with no issues, but once you trigger the hourly request limit point (+ up to about 10%), it immediately goes to 429 spam mode. What makes it worse, once you start receiving 429’s, you must use retry chains, repeated request timeouts and it slows down the entire process to a crawl. It’s a difficult problem to handle properly. A single character update can easily take over 30 API calls with ~2/3rd’s being 429 errors. Because of this, collected data is getting stale and character data is getting outdated (30d refresh rule). It’s literally a project crippling issue.
Similar (not so bad as current one) issue with 429 errors happened before in March this year, and it blew over quickly. But this time it’s counting almost 2 months and with no end in sight. I would like to know, if it’s (enforced 36k rq/h) a bug or it’s a new norm going forward? Rules are rules, but it is important to know if this change is staying, so I can re-evaluate what my project can achieve with this enforced limit.
Thank You!
Edit a week later:
Hello. Any update on this?
There is a lot of possible situations that could lead to this. Reduced server infrastructure capacity, sudden increase in API clients so more devs have to share same resource pool or simply a policy change for rule enforcement. Whatever it is, I (and a lot of others devs) need to know whats happening for months now. Silence doesn’t help here.
Edit 6 months later:
The bug report is no longer relevant and can be considered solved. Thank you for your blazing fast response!