Hitting YouTube API serving limit with the slightest load

Question

I have a script at parse.com which imports a fresh information about recent videos from ~10 channels with YouTube v3 API. It worked well for some time, but about a month ago it started to fail once or twice per day with an error:

Error: can't fetch https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/... "error": { "errors": [ { "domain": "usageLimits", "reason": "servingLimitExceeded", "message": "Serving Limit Exceeded" } ], "code": 403, "message": "Serving Limit Exceeded" }

As you can see from the following screenshot I use maximum 37k of 50000k units available per day. I estimate one script run could take maximum 2k units. To make absolutely sure I'm not hitting 3k units/second/user limit I've added 1 second delay before every call to YouTube API, but I still see those errors occasionally.

What's going on? Does YouTube v3 API have some other limits, for example units per IP? (one IP at Parse could host thousands of installations)

Answer 1

I think this is a issue on YouTube's end and doesn't seem related to the actual quota used.

I have been getting quite a few of these errors sporadically, and seemingly for no reason, over the last few weeks - see YouTube Data API - “Serving Limit Exceeded”

Answer 2

I've just filed a bug report with YouTube. Please "star" that issue to draw attention to it and track updates, if you'd like.