Api VKontakte has a limit of 3 requests per second. However, users.search has some sort of restriction on the number of calls.

In addition to restrictions on the frequency of calls, there are also quantitative restrictions on calling methods of the same type. For obvious reasons, we do not provide information on exact limits.

It is necessary to find 1000 people in the social network (customers of the company). If api worked well, it would be 300 seconds. And what to do with the fact that on the Nth query api returns 0 found? It seems that the N-order of tens.
Other methods work, and this one produces 0. And even if you try to search for people just in the browser, there are also 0 found.

Who faced, explain how long this shutdown of the search takes place. And maybe there is a pause for some time, above which the search always works and returns results?

Check through execute here

 var found = API.users.search({"q":"Иванов Иван"}); return found;

Running this code gives response: { count: 0, items: [] } when users.search suddenly stops working.

  • It seems that not only users.search subject to limitation, but also wall.search . Checked, "ban" fairly quickly with the same symptoms as in the question. Unfortunately, it was not possible to calculate the moment from which inquiries about the request it began. It is likely that audio.search , as well as video.search also very limited. - alexis031182
  • @ alexis031182 To be honest, because of this ambiguity, I don’t really want to work with them, I don’t take work on them anymore. Programming and fuzzy rules are incompatible. - shukshin.ivan
  • If the admissible number of requests will be known in advance, the bot descriptors will bypass the restriction by using an unlimited number of user accounts in the parser, of which you can buy online, even in batches. And here it turns out that returning a zero value does not guarantee at any time that the search did not detect data on the requested string. Maybe they have, and maybe the account is already banned. This leads to the fact that you need to perform a separate query with a pre-checked for correctness result for each zero response. This of course will allow you to check the accuracy of the answer, but greatly reduce the efficiency. - alexis031182
  • But one cannot but agree that this measure with an unknown limit ruins life and those who are ready to play by the rules. Apparently, choosing to protect against abuse, they decided to disregard the discontent of the users who comply with the rules. - alexis031182

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