Restriction on the number of webservice call per minute

Question

Is there a limitation of the number of webservice call per minute? If yes, where can I set the parameter? What is governing the limit of number of call per minute? It's the Apache, or the application itself?

OK, maybe I should express myself clearer. I have two PHP applications. One is calling another one via webservice. And for the first call it would have to call a custom login method. For certain (unknown) reasons the login method may sometimes return fail.

I can check what is the corresponding failed status code, but in the mean time, I want to know whether the failure could possibly caused by external factors rather than internal application limitation.

Answer 1

There is no restriction in Apache on the number of requests per minute. If you are seeing your requests limited from a specific web service, it is most likely that service itself which has throttled the number of requests allowed per client. If you are experiencing limits on scripts running locally, it may just be a resources issue (i.e. not enough memory).

Answer 2

Bandwidth can be limited by your Internet Provider, thus limiting the amount of data that you can send or receive. To increase this, you'll have to pay more to your ISP.
Of course, your hardware is also limited in the amount of data it can process at any time. If you're on a network and your outside connection is 100 MBit, but the cable from your router to your server is only 5MBit then this would also limit the amount of data that you can process per minute.
The limit for your web services will be determined by the amount of data that they will send and receive. AFAIK, there's no limit to the number of calls on the server. However, client systems might have a limit. I know that SOAP clients for Windows that use the standard Internet libraries from Microsoft will have the number of calls throttled. This is also true for the Internet Explorer browsers, which can limit the amount of outgoing connections. A firewall might also throttle the number of incoming and outgoing connections, which is common sense just in case some virus infected your system and starts DDOS'ing other sites.
In other words, limits occur on the whole traject between server and client.