Rate Limits for AIO Public APIs

AIO Tests enforces rate limits on the requests users can make to the APIs. This article provides details about AIO’s rate limiting policy to help manage how the user’s app responds.

What is rate limiting?

Rate limiting is a technique used to control the frequency at which a client or user can make requests to an API. It imposes restrictions on the number of requests that a client can make within a specific time period.

Why rate limit?

Rate limiting has become a common practice in public API consumptions and are necessary for several important reasons, primary amongst which are :

1. Preventing Abuse

2. Protecting Backend Services from potential downtime or decrease in performance

3. Fair Access to the API

Overall, rate limiting is a critical mechanism to maintain the stability, security, and reliability of APIs, benefiting both API providers and users.

AIO Public API rate limits

At present, the limit is 60 requests per minute. This limit is applied to a single IP.

Rate limit detection

If the threshold is breached, apps can detect rate limits by checking if the HTTP response status code is 429. Any REST API can return a rate limit response.

Rate limit handling

Once you hit your rate limit, you’d need to make your program sleep for a few seconds (if the earlier requests were distributed across the one minute) or for maximum of 60 seconds, if all 60 requests were done in a burst, in order to send one more request otherwise subsequent requests would fail. With the default of 60 requests/min, customers can effectively send 1 request every second.