| The downvotes remind me of a thing at a job. We had an API for programmatic access to our customer's data, and one customer had bought some expensive BI-solution that they wanted to feed with data from the system we provided. For months they came to us and complained that the API was broken and asked us to fix it. When I looked in the logs I could see that they hit the API with a lot of requests in short succession that generated 403 responses, so we said that they need to look at how they authorise. After a while they returned and claimed our API was broken. Eventually I offered to look at their code and they were like 'yeah sure but your silly little PHP dev won't understand our perfect C# application'. So I looked at it and it was a mess of auto-concurrent, nested, for-loops. If they had gotten any data out it would have been an explosion of tens of thousands of requests within a few seconds. They also didn't understand the Bearer-scheme and just threw the string they got from the auth-endpoint straight into the Authorization-header without any prefix. Maybe we should have answered with 400 instead of 403, but yeah, that would have been a breaking change and we didn't want or have time to do a new API version because of this. Anyway, their tech-manager got really mad that I found the issue within an hour that they had struggled with for months, and also had mentioned that the API-adapter was designed for DoS rather than a polite API-consumer and maybe they should rewrite it to be less greedy and maybe also use ranges instead of crapping out a new request per row in in a response and stitching it together again on their end. A few weeks later they got it running and it was brutal, but our machines could take the load so we didn't think more about it. Later I heard they got performance issues on their end and had to do as I had suggested anyway. Be polite and pay attention to detail when you integrate with protocols and API:s. At best you'll be a nuisance if you don't, but many will just block you permanently. |