Method Community

WHEN DID YOU START THROTTLING THE NUMBER OF API CALLS PER MINUTE?!    

Hi Mark,

Throttling was implemented on April 27th, but only for the purpose of collecting usage data.  The values of throttling were set at very a high number such that there would be a very low likelihood that any users of the API would hit this level during the data collection period. We have since had reports of users hitting these high levels, and on May 2nd have temporarily further increased the high level of limits during the data collection period.

No date has been set for throttling to offically begin, but it will be late spring / early summer.  We will share the inital throttling values to you prior to actually implementing them.

Hello - I wanted to REALLY EXPRESS how frustrating the issues created by the throttling implementation was for us.

When we previously used to invoice services through Method we experienced unresolvable and seemingly random errors and the process took hours to complete. To fix the issue we worked with Mark Crews to create an "offline," invoicing process where invoices were created on an external server and then inserted back into Method. This work around was tremendously successful and dramatically improved the usefulness of the system. The downside is that creating the work around invoicing process required a significant financial investment.

Franchise Owners started invoicing on April 29th for April service. Due to the new API throttling they were unable to create invoices and were very unhappy. In fact, as the owner of the franchise system I was not a well-liked. We didn't know what the issue was and Mark Crews spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night working to figure out what was going on and create an additional work around so that FO’s could invoice their clients. I am extremely grateful to Mark performed, however, it was a huge waste of emotional energy for the franchise owners, Mark and myself. It also required an additional financial expenditure on my end to have Mark investigate and resolve the issue.

This may seem like it's not a big deal but invoicing is a very pivotal part of cash flow and keeping the business running and so the impact of the throttling issue was very large.

In summary - we need to know when changes are made that may negatively impact the system, integrations, API's, etc. and we need enough advance notice to proactively create any necessary changes. Otherwise, I wind up publicly playing catch up and diverting funds from planned projects to unnecessary issue resolution.

Thank you and have a nice day - Jacob

Hi Jacob,

Thank you for sharing this with us. We do understand that your business is dependant on Method, and that the API is an important extension to help you run your business efficiently.

As Jon had mentioned, it was not the intention of our team to actually go live with the true limits. Our only intention was to collect data, so that we can communicate with API users and work with them to optimize their usage before we go live.

The initial usage per minute value was set at a very high number that we anticipated wouldn't have been possible to hit for a single authenticated user running a single program in a single thread. So the release on April 27th should have been totally hidden from you.

What is clear now, is that we have more to learn about how the API is being used and how it is possible to hit it as hard as it was hit in such a short period of time.

We are sincerely sorry for any grief this may have caused you, your team, and your partner. Moving forward, we will work with API developers to understand how they use the API prior to implementing actual throttle limits and really going live.

--Audisho

Why is Method setting the API call limit back to 180 per min again? I thought you gusy realzie that 180 is way too low. We are a small size company and we maybe import less than 100 invoice a day using the API calls and we are hitting the limit easily.

Hi Jason,

It appears as though the values were reverted when we deployed the update on Wednesday. We've once again increased them and will make some additional changes in order to prevent this from occurring again in the future. Sorry again for the inconvenience.

--Audisho