Twitter Streaming API limits?

Question

I understand the Twitter REST API has strict request limits (few hundred times per 15 minutes), and that the streaming API is sometimes better for retrieving live data.

My question is, what exactly are the streaming API limits? Twitter references a percentage on their docs, but not a specific amount. Any insight is greatly appreciated.

What I'm trying to do:

• Simple page for me to view the latest tweet (& date / time it was posted) from ~1000 twitter users. It seems I would rapidly hit the limit using the REST API, so would the streaming API be required for this application?

Answer 1

You should be fine using the Streaming API, unless those ~1000 users combined are tweeting more than (very) roughly 60 tweets per second at any moment.

Using the Streaming API endpoint statuses/filter with the follow parameter, you are allowed up to 5000 users. There is no rate limit except when the stream returns more than about 1% of the all tweets being tweeted at that moment. (60 tweets per second is 1% of the average rate of tweets, which is always fluctuating, so don't rely on that number.)

If your stream does go above the 1% threshold, you can detect this. (See the LIMIT notice.) Then you would use the REST API to find missed tweets.