Breaking News: Blizzard Implements New Armory Throttling Policy?

by Trouble on January 15, 2010 under News

Update: It appears that it was either a temporary problem or they merely changed the timeout. Upon further investigation it appears that the armory will throttle requests that come faster than about one per 1.4 seconds over a long period of tie (about 10 minutes). If you are doing continuous requests you can safely do them at one per 1.5 seconds without tripping the throttle. You can also send 45 requests in a very short period of time (a few seconds) before getting throttled. At this point you need to take a break for a few minutes. You just need to make sure it averages out to one per 1.5 seconds over the long term or else you will be throttled. If you start receiving 503 errors and you keep sending requests you will get a 12 hour “ban” and receive all 503’s for the duration. If you do receive any 503’s you should stop requests immediately and take a break.

This isn’t documented everywhere, this merely comes from putting the puzzle pieces together.  Blizzard MAY have instituted a new throttling policy to the armory today, not sure. First I heard about it was from a friend developing some tools that require pulling info on everyone in a guild from the armory. At first she was getting intermittent 503 errors, then more often, and then every request was a 503 error. Still the same two hours later, just from that IP. The armory tools at MMO-Champion are no longer functioning as of today. Guildprogress.com reports today:

“The World of Warcraft armory servers appear to be experience some congestion and/or downtime at the moment that is prevent our crawlers from reaching them. Hopefully this is resolved shortly and any guilds in the queue will be crawled when their servers are fixed. Sorry for the delay!”

The armory seems to be functioning perfectly fine under normal use, but it seems to be dying for any tools that access it a lot. Does anyone have any more info on this? It would really suck if this is a permanent change, as I think third party armory based tools add a lot of functionality and usefulness to the community.

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3 comments

  1. Escott
    01/15/2009
    7:19 pm
    I've been hitting a lot of roadblocks with evaluation sites such as be.imba.hu or my favorite wow-heroes.com over the past two weeks. All I can confirm from correspondence is that it is not an incompatibility or error with the data interpretation nor is it a case of the service websites undergoing maintenance.

    Anecdotally, I've seen these errors ramping up to this announcement for some time and I don't believe Blizzard has found their "sweet spot" for queries per second yet. With community uproar imminent, I expect them to set the throttle trim higher than it is currently. However, this is ultimately a business decision and batch evaluation tools can't be cheap on their end once adopted by a widespread audience.
  2. Dan
    01/16/2009
    9:28 am
    I hope this is just a temporary change. It would indeed suck if third party websites that use the armory information could not obtain it. However, previously the armory was only available at off-peak hours, making the service truely useless under most circumastances.

    I really hope they can get a happy medium with the armory.
  3. Epic Puck » Blizzard throttling the armory?
    01/20/2009
    3:50 pm
    [...] read this post on TardFactor which suggest that it might have occurred but I just don’t see it.  Currently, my raid [...]

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