Buffering

Streams that you access via the /stream endpoint in the REST API are buffered on the server for a short period. You can write code to poll the endpoint to retrieve data. This method is different to the streaming API, which performs no server-side buffering.

Some key features of buffered streams:

• If a stream, defined by the hash, is not loaded on the DataSift system the first request will return empty.
• The internal buffer stores only the last 200 interactions at any given time.
• The data in the buffer is stored for five minutes and if no API request is received by the system during that time, the rule is unloaded and billing ceases.
• You do not need not send another request until 10 seconds have passed. Nothing will change if you send another request in less than 10 seconds..