Simon Willison’s Weblog

Do Twitter API limits rest at the top of the hour or is it floating?

29th January 2012

My answer to Do Twitter API limits rest at the top of the hour or is it floating? on Quora

I’m pretty sure they are calculated from the time of the first hit you make to the API—resetting on the hour would likely encourage API users to run large batches of queries at 1 second past the hour, resulting in huge and unwanted traffic spikes.