API Woes - Intermittent Outages

Been having some trouble with the API lately. It seems that there is some sort of traffic limiter in place that will shut you out for making repeated API requests. For me, it translates into a major headache for development.

Here's what I see:
Assume an Http Request to the API, correctly formatted to request a list of blogs for a given username and password. Now, issue that request about 3 times a minute, as you would during a routine code/build/test/debug session. Notice that the request works as advertised for about 5 minutes of this sort of activity. Notice that after those 5 minutes, the request starts returning Blogger error screens instead of XML data. Notice that after about 10 more minutes of inactivity, the request starts working again.

To me, that looks like something put in place by the Blogger team to discourage Spammers from abusing the API. Unfortunately, it also discourages application developers from using the API, since it is basically unusable.

I've posted my experiences over at the Blogger API discussion group. Let's hope that somebody knows a workaround!