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Rate limiting

solderpunk solderpunk at SDF.ORG

Tue Mar 24 20:17:11 GMT 2020

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Howdy all,

As part of the broader discussion of "Good Gemini citizenship" I wantedto bring up the issue of rate limiting.

The Gemini protocol features a mechanism by which servers can explicitlytell robots "slow down, you are requesting things too fast!".  To myknowledge (but I could be wrong) no servers have actually implementedsupport for this yet.

Obviously exactly when this mechanism should kick in can be somethingdetermined by individual server authors (who can decide defaults) and/orserver admins (who can override those defaults).  But what do we thinksane ballpark defaults may be?

This applies not only to server authors but also authors of bots.  Okay,in principle a bot can start hitting a server as fast as possibleimmediately and wait for the server to say "stop", but that's rude.  Itwould be nice to have a guideline in place, which could be mentioned inthe Best Practices, for what is considered reasonable.

Current CAPCOM won't send consecutive requests to a single host withless than 5 seconds between them.  That's probably gentler thannecessary, but I don't really mind, it runs once per six hours and is inno rush.

What seems reasonable?

Cheers,Solderpunk