The Movie Database Support
Support → API Support
TMDB Rate Limits
posted by nitrous10STAFFMOD on November 2, 2023 at 1:16 AM
Hi TMDB team! I’m creating an app where users can look up movie and tv show information, but I’m worried about the API rate limits. From previous threads, it seems like the API is limited to ~50 requests per second. I anticipate having potentially hundreds of simultaneous users, each hitting my server with multiple simultaneous requests which make calls to TMDB to fetch movie/tv show information (TMDB api calls coming from one server). Is the rate limit something I should worry about in this case? If so, is there a way for production apps to bypass this limit? Should I instead have each user make requests to TMDB from their local device (since rate limits seem to be by IP address)?
Reply by Travis Bell
on November 2, 2023 at 1:24 PM
Hi @nitrous10, indeed we only rate limit by IP address, so how this works in practice will be up to how you design your system. You can have your users make direct requests if you want, or you can build your own system that caches and stores data as necessary, so you aren't making as many live calls to the API over time.