Method to find API call usage - amazon-mws

I am operating in a production environment with a number of different applications using the Amazon API. Of these, some are our own home-grown apps, and others are 3rd party shipping applications.
I have a situation where I am hitting an hourly throttle for the Reports API 'GetReport' request, and I am trying to determine what is causing us to be throttled. By my count, we shouldn't be exceeding ~60 calls per hour at the absolute maximum. (Just a note, while API info says this function call throttles at 60 requests per hour, the exception I received back indicated a cap of 120 requests per hour. Maybe the exception is wrong, and I'm hitting a 60 request cap?)
Is there either an API call to determine current call usage, or a method of accessing this information via Amazon Seller Central / Developers Program? I've done some searching around but everything I can find is describing how the throttling works which isn't my problem.
I am currently using C# Amazon MWS libraries for all function calls, although that information is a bit superfluous. Any insight into the proper API call to use, or how to gain access to this information would be greatly appreciated.

In the response to most calls you get back something like the following in the response.
"x-mws-quota-max"=>"60.0",
"x-mws-quota-remaining"=>"51.0",
"x-mws-quota-resetsOn"=>"2016-03-25T16:00:00.000Z"
You should be able to use this to figure out what is causing you to hit the limit quicker than expected. Perhaps logging out the call and the response with the data above??

Contact MWS Support here and ask for clarification on your issue. They surely know of your usage in order to be able to cap it. I met with the MWS team a few months ago in Detroit and they said any time you have a technical question to ask them. They've been really helpful to me.

Related

big data load in salesforce

I came across weird constraint, want to hear if anyone has resolved this issue.
Problem statement: load data in salesforce from outside. volume of data is 1 million record in a burst, every 3 hrs.
my source orchestration tool (NiFi) is capable of making this many REST API, but salesforce has asked not to use REST with this much throughput. I am not sure if its a limit of salesforce or product team has created a artificial ceiling.
they have suggested use dataloader, which seems to be a batch loader for salesforce, but it is not that fast either. also it has different issues. I cant trigger dataloader, when i get the data, so not that helpful either.
Long time back i have used Informatica to connect to salesforce, and we used to pass similar amount of data, and with no issue. Can someone answer how informatica connector has solved this bottleneck issue ?what does it use underneath?
also any other way to push this much data to salesforce?
Short answer: rethink your use case. Rewrite your app to use different mechanism of connecting to SF.
Long answer: Standard Salesforce API (SOAP or REST, doesn't matter) is synchronous. Request-response, job done. It's limited to 200 records max in one API call. Your volumes are better suited for bulk API. That one is REST-only (although it can accept XML, JSON or CSV), up to 10K records in one API call. The key difference is that it's asynchronous. You submit the job, you get back the job's id, you can check it (every 10 seconds? every minute?) "is it done yet? if it is - give me back my success/failure results". But every of these checks will of course consume 1 API call too. In meantime SF received a bunch of zipped files from you and will work on unzipping and processing them as fast as resources allow.
So (ignoring the initial login call) let's talk about limits. In sandboxes the 24h rolling limit of API calls is 5 million calls. Massive. In production it's 15K API calls + 1K per every full license user you have (sales cloud, service cloud) + you can buy more capacity... Or just go to Setup -> Company Information and check your limit.
let's say you have 5 users so 20K calls/day in production. In 24h at max capacity you'll be able to push 10K * 20K = 200M inserts/updates. Well, bit less because of login calls and checking the status and pulling down the results file but still - pretty good. If that's not enough - you have bigger problems ;) Using standard API would let you go 200 * 20K = mere 4M records.
SF support told you to use Data Loader because in DL it's just ticking a checkbox to use bulk API. You don't care that backend mechanism is different. You could even script Data Loader to run from commandline (https://resources.docs.salesforce.com/216/latest/en-us/sfdc/pdf/salesforce_data_loader.pdf chapter 4). Or if it's a Java application - just reuse the JAR file on top of which DL UI is built.
These might help too:
https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/large-data-volumes/load-your-data
https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/api_basics/api_basics_bulk

How Can You Determine When a Request Started on GAE Managed VM?

On Google App Engine, there are multiple ways a request can start: a web request, a cron job, a taskqueue, and probably others as well.
How could you (especially on Managed VM) determine the time when your current request began?
One solution is to instrument all of your entry points, and save the start time somewhere, but it would be nice if there was an environment variable or something that told when the request started. The reason this is important is because many GAE requests have deadlines (either 60 seconds or 10 minutes in various scenarios), and it's helpful to determine how much time you have left in a request when you are doing some additional work.
We don't specifically expose anything that lets you know how much time is left on the current request. You should be able to do this by recording the time at the entrypoint of a request, and storing it in a thread local static.
The need for this sounds... questionable. Why are you doing this? It may be a better idea to use a worker / queue pattern with polling for something that could take a long time.
You can see all this information in the logs in your Developer console. You can also add more data to the logs in your code, as necessary.
See Writing Application Logs.

Appengine: How to debug too many datastore writes?

I have a little web shop hosted on AppEngine. It has ~100 products. Apart from orders (1/month) and registrations (1/month), I am not writing to the datastore.
I have a session included (http://gaeutilities.appspot.com/cookiesession) and some indexes for sorting.
Analytics tells me it was 1,315 page views in the last 30 days. That is ~44 per day causing 50,000 write operations (=1136/request)?
I can't really believe that. Any ideas how to debug this issue?
I would recommend taking a look at AppStats, which will give you a breakdown of all your RPC calls. It's really very handy for exactly this kind of scenario.
The logs helped (oh wonder!). It always fails by using the session:
[..]
File "/base/data/home/apps/[..]/12.376983336014703566/appengine_utilities/sessions.py", line 87, in put
db.put(self)
[..]
OverQuotaError: The API call datastore_v3.Put() required more quota than is available.

Best practices to limit the number of calls to Mirror API

I, like everyone else I imagine, have a courtesy limit of 1000 Mirror API calls per day.
I see there's a batching facility that looks promising, but it appears to be able to batch only requests for a single credential. So even one customer, pushing to the API every 60 seconds will be 1440 requests/day. Ideally, 30 seconds is where I'd like to be. 2880 requests/day would be multiplied by the number of customers. It will get really big really fast.
I might be missing something, but I don't see a way around that.
If it were available I could glom all updates across all clients in the 30 second period into one giant message...
Is there a better design pattern to keep cards up-to-date with telemetry that's changing in real-time?
You can send requests to multiple users with a single batch request: instead of setting the Authorization header in the batch request, simply set the Authorization header in each sub-request.
Our Python and Java Quick Start projects have an example of using batch request to send an update to up to 10 users. This is also mentioned in the Building Glass Services with the Google Mirror API I/O session.
Otherwise, you can check the protocol documentation in our reference guide.
As Scarygami mentioned, each sub-request will consume quota so the only optimization is to save on bandwidth and HTTP requests, especially if using gzip encoding.

Is there a way to make more than 10K requests on Google search from the same IP?

I am currently working to an app that requires to scrape data from Google's search results. For example google.com/search?q=domain.com and so on. But Google blocks my IP address after making some requests. I know there are Google APIs, but there are many sites around that just scrape the data directly.
Scraping Google search results is a breech of the terms-of-service. Google actively discourages such and blocks those who do. They share their information with you free of charge but they don't appreciate you trying to get a copy of all of it.
Better to do your own crawling of the domain.
Too bad I did not see your question earlier, if it's not too late:
Scraping Google does indeed violate their terms of service, on the other hand you may choose not to accept them. You would accept their TOS when you create a Google account for example but as far as I know you can also reject the acceptance again (at least when they change them).
For a smaller amount of data you can use their API or also their commercial API but if you need the results and ranks exactly as a user will see them (SEO purposes) I know no official way to get their permission.
I am not a lawyer, so you might want to consult one if you want to make sure about legal consequences.
However, scraping Google usually does not lead to any legal problems. I remember that even Bing (Microsofts engine) got caught scraping Google for unknown keywords. That happened a few years ago. My personal guess is that the majority of their original results were copied from Google in secret.
There is an open source project http://google-rank-checker.squabbel.com which does work to scrape large amounts of Google results. As far as I remember, without modification it is limited to about 50-70k resultpages per day.
I suggest to take a look at the code, it's PHP with libcURL.
You will need proper IP addresses (not shared, not previously abused) as well. Scraping with a single IP will result in getting blocked by Google within an hour.
Usually the first thing that happens is a captcha, by solving the captcha you generate a cookie which allows you to keep making requests.
If you continue you will get a complete ban.
And if you "hammer" Google with a huge amount of requests you will alert their staff and they can put a manual ban on the whole ISP or network block.
A proper amount is around 10 requests per hour with an IP, that's what I have been sticking to on my related projects.
So if someone scrapes Google, make sure you have functions which validate the results and watch for unexpected returns. In such a case your code should immediately stop accessing Google to prevent further accessing a page which is just showing a captcha.

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