[OSM-talk] Bandwidth limit/IP blocking - Error 303 on the OSM API?

Frank Steggink steggink at steggink.org
Wed Jun 1 21:48:56 BST 2011


On 11-06-01 10:11 PM, Peter Mooney wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Quick question regarding the OSM API.
>
> I have a server setup for my OSM research - it has a very fast 
> Internet link. My personal, home, broadband is much slower and limited 
> to 5Gb per month.
>
> Anyway during April I downloaded the history files (in OSM-XML) for a 
> couple of thousand ways. I just dumped wget commands into a bash 
> script and let it chug away. The total size of all the XML files is 
> about 1200 Mb.
>
> Anyway wanted to download an addition 2,000 ways (their full history) 
> from the same machine today
> - example "wget http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/way/2048/history 
> -O ./world-xml/history-2048.xml"
>
> I keep getting an ERROR 303 .. The error message doesn't make sense to 
> me.
>
> However when I try this command from my machine at home - it downloads 
> no problem.
>
> Have I found myself on a "banned" list? It would not be my intention 
> to hog resources on anyone else - but I didn't think the requests were 
> excessive. It took a couple of days to download the history files - i 
> put an hour pause into the bash script after every 500 files downloaded.
>
> Suggestions, work-arounds?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Peter
>
Hi Peter,

When you've been downloading too much data, you'll get a 509 error. See 
here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.6#Error_codes
The download limit is unknown, but it's far, far more than the average 
user. A while back I got this error while I was downloading many 
sections of urbanized areas while importing data. Using a dump would not 
be possible, since I would miss my (and other's) previous uploads, made 
about an hour before. I even noticed that using the "data" feature on 
the main OSM site was not working anymore. I was still able to upload 
data though.

For your intention, the suggestion proposed by Richard is the way to go. 
The API is not particularly well suited to obtain the history from. 
You'll often get errors (something like: "it took the API too long to 
retrieve the history data") when getting histories of large objects, 
and/or objects with long histories.

Frank




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