Would it be reasonable to proxy every server call to get around API restrictions (i.e. Twitter)?

Question

I've run into a few problems with API limits(too many calls) and server timeouts(calls too fast) while coding an AIR App.

I'm not very familiar with the performance of proxies, so I'm wondering if downloading a list of proxies to the app every so often and using a different proxy for every API call would be reasonably fast. I'm not even sure where to get an updated list of proxies, so any insight would help.

Feel free to suggest other, alternative solutions. Thanks!

Answer 1

By going the proxy route you are effectively making every one of your users violate Twitters TOS. That is a bad, bad idea.

What I would suggest is:

• Allow the client to set the interval
• Refresh / fetch your data in another thread that obeys the client's interval
• Let your users configure a SOCKS proxy, or their own favorite HTTP proxy

At that point, it is them, not you who (might) annoy twitter.

Still, give some thought to the tenability of your app, if it needs to make requests so quickly in order to be usable. The last thing you want is someone saying "I downloaded footwit and now I'm banned from twitter! I had to pay $10 to get a new IP from my ISP, then I found out that Twitter banned the entire /20 !!"

Think, think, think.