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by carlmungz 3354 days ago
No worries. I'm into aggregation and scraping and your article had some good stuff in it. I've been scraping a site for a project of mine once every three minutes and I thought that was a bit much. Didn't realise it could be as low as once every 15 seconds.
1 comments

The longer between your requests, the better.

If you generate a load greater than what a human would do, this might become problematic. A human wouldn't poke a website forever every 10-15 seconds.

The 10-15 seconds is more for web crawlers. Eventually, a crawler will run out of pages to crawl on a website, so it will stop sending requests to it.

Personally, I would stick to the 3 minutes delay. But it depends on what type of website you're scraping :)