Advanced Troubleshooting: What are API Limits?

While using Faster Suite, you may occasionally notice the top progress bar appears to nearly completely fill up: 

And you may receive a notification such as the one below:

Additionally, when this happens, you may notice that Faster Suite appears to slow down and saving operations may take longer than normal. 

Even when you are not actively working on documents, Faster Suite is continually communicating with Clio in the background.  As part of the communications, Faster Suite sends messages (called "API Requests") to Clio.  API Requests may be questions like "Is my list of matters up to date?" or commands like "Save this document to Clio."

As a matter of precaution, Clio allows users to send a certain number of API Requests to Clio every minute.  When a user is below the limit and sends a request, Clio will process the request as normal, however, when a user is above the limit, Clio will reject the request.  In order to prevent requests being rejected, as a matter of precaution, whenever Faster Suite gets close to its limit, it will automatically slow down the number of requests that it is sending to Clio (this is called "Throttling").  Once the current minute has elapsed, Faster Suite will begin sending requests normally.

When someone is using Faster Suite, they will normally have a limit of 300 API Requests per minute which is more than sufficient for nearly all situations (the only exception may be if you are doing a document import or export).  Sometimes, however, if Clio is performing maintenance or upgrades to their system, they may temporarily reduce this limit to 50 API Requests per minute.  When this happens, this is a temporary reduction that Clio is applying and the reduction will be eliminated as soon as Clio removes it.