X’s rate limit, solved instead of hit.
You have seen the failure. The top of a thread fills in, then nothing does. That is the limit: fifty account lookups every fifteen minutes, and one busy thread has more accounts than that.
Most profiles here never cost one. They are already cached, or someone else looked them up and the shared cache answers. The rest is rationed.
background, trickled out across the full fifteen minutes
held back, so a hover is never the request that runs you dry
The real number
The budget comes from X’s own response headers, not a guess baked in at build time. Your hovers count against it too.
- Source
- x-rate-limit-*
Spread, not sprinted
Roughly one lookup every 21 seconds, recomputed each time — stretching when you hover a lot, tightening when the window refills.
- Pace
- window ÷ budget
Hovers always win
Background work stops at 85%, so the rest of the window is there for accounts you actually point at.
- Reserved
- 8 of 50
Run it dry anyway and you get a countdown to the reset, not a blank flag. The share and the pacing are both yours to change.