Rate limiting

1. solderpunk (solderpunk (a) SDF.ORG)

Howdy all,

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

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

Obviously exactly when this mechanism should kick in can be something
determined by individual server authors (who can decide defaults) and/or
server admins (who can override those defaults).  But what do we think
sane 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 possible
immediately and wait for the server to say "stop", but that's rude.  It
would be nice to have a guideline in place, which could be mentioned in
the Best Practices, for what is considered reasonable.

Current CAPCOM won't send consecutive requests to a single host with
less than 5 seconds between them.  That's probably gentler than
necessary, but I don't really mind, it runs once per six hours and is in
no rush.

What seems reasonable?

Cheers,
Solderpunk

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