Sleeping Between API Requests

I spent a few minutes today debugging the reason why one of my “rake” tasks was getting 503 connections (Service Unavailable) from Yahoo’s API.

I had mistakenly thought this was due to the fact that Yahoo limits the number of requests to their API in a given day. I decided to put a “sleep” call in my code to be sure it wasn’t being denied access due to server-side throttling. Sure enough — all requests succeeded after adding a brief call to the “sleep” function.