iTunes Search API rate limit

Question

Am planning to use iTunes Search API to get App related information - http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentation/itunes-store-web-service-search-api.html

Wanted to know if there is any pre-defined Rate/Throttle Limit on the API usage. Couldn't find any info related to this in their Documentation / Stack / Google.

Does anyone have info on this?

Answer 1

If you are looking for a large amount of records, it might be easier to download the EPF file first - then supplement your updates using the lookup API:

https://affiliate.itunes.apple.com/resources/documentation/itunes-enterprise-partner-feed/

If you hit the Search or Lookup API aggressively, you may start to experience longer response times, greater than 30 seconds or failed responses.

Answer 2

I don't know what the exact rate limit is and couldn't find any info on this from Apple. But I can assure you that there must be a rate limit somehow since most of my requests on my server don't succeed, they result to an HTTP Status 403. The exact same requests work on other computers and sometime later (on retries) on the same server.

I have tried to find the limits by making a lot of requests concurrently on my development computer but no requests lead to the same error as on my server. My server makes several dozen thousands of requests per day at the moment (I'm fetching all links once for caching those) which leads to more than 90 % of the requests to fail – but some succeed.

Therefore I did as suggested by Ted Hosmann an contacted Apple for access to the EPF files. If you don't exceed more than – say – a dozen thousand of requests per day, I guess the rate limit shouldn't be a problem for you. That's the number of requests I tried on my computer concurrently without any problems. If you need more, you should use the iTunes Enterprise Partner Feed as well.

Answer 3

Answering the original question:

The Search API is limited to approximately 20 calls per minute (subject to change). If you require heavier usage, we suggest you consider using our Enterprise Partner Feed (EPF). For more information, visit the EPF documentation page.

This is from iTunes Search API Documentation