Immediate question: rate limiting? Presumably they’re hoping it will settle down into a regular cycle dominated by people on the street, but it certainly has the potential to get thousands of requests per minute. (And since they wisely programmed a transition to avoid a having a strobe effect on the side of their building, they can’t keep up with thousands of requests per minute.) Do they queue? Drop requests on the floor? (Either is disappointing from the use case presented in this post.) I tried it (from the east coast, so I have no way to verify my request had any effect), and it came back in several seconds, so perhaps they’re queuing and haven’t really been hammered yet, or perhaps they lied to me, or perhaps they take advantage of the relatively few possible color combinations to coalesce requests for the same combination.
Immediate question: rate limiting? Presumably they’re hoping it will settle down into a regular cycle dominated by people on the street, but it certainly has the potential to get thousands of requests per minute. (And since they wisely programmed a transition to avoid a having a strobe effect on the side of their building, they can’t keep up with thousands of requests per minute.) Do they queue? Drop requests on the floor? (Either is disappointing from the use case presented in this post.) I tried it (from the east coast, so I have no way to verify my request had any effect), and it came back in several seconds, so perhaps they’re queuing and haven’t really been hammered yet, or perhaps they lied to me, or perhaps they take advantage of the relatively few possible color combinations to coalesce requests for the same combination.