API Best Practices and Rate Limiting
Interfolio APIs give institutions a secure, automated way to connect Interfolio with the other systems they rely on every day. Instead of re-entering or manually exporting data, your teams can let their systems exchange it directly. Because many institutions share the same Interfolio services, how an integration is built matters. A well-designed integration is faster for you, more reliable, and keeps the experience quick for every other user, including your own faculty, staff, and applicants. This article explains how API rate limits work and how to build integrations that use requests efficiently. You’ll learn how to retrieve only the data you need, pace and retry requests, schedule large jobs, and choose the right endpoint. When we introduce a new rate limit, we will announce it in our release notes.
Interfolio API Use Cases and Rate Limiting
Common API use cases
Institutions use our APIs to:
- Connect HR and enterprise systems so that, for example, a job requisition can create a position in Faculty Search and hiring information can flow back.
- Keep user and academic unit information in sync across systems.
- Send Interfolio data to an institutional data warehouse or reporting tool for analysis.
- Display open positions on an institution’s own career pages.
- Automate repetitive administrative work and reduce manual errors.
About rate limiting
To keep our services fast and reliable for everyone, we may apply rate limits to any Interfolio API endpoint. A rate limit caps how many requests can be made in a given period. Limits may be introduced or adjusted as we continue to monitor performance and review our APIs, and they most often affect integrations that send very large numbers of requests in a short time. Our APIs Terms of Service state that Interfolio may set and enforce limits on API usage.
If you reach the rate limit additional requests are temporarily declined, typically with an HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests) response, which means you should wait before trying again. Requests are accepted again once the waiting period has passed. Following the best practices below will help your integration stay well within any limit.
Best Practices
Reduce unnecessary requests
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Retrieve only what has changed: Avoid pulling every record on every run. Where an API supports it, retrieve only records changed since your last successful run. For example, in Faculty Search, the “last update” endpoints take a start and end time (Unix timestamps) and return only records changed in that window:
- Positions:
GET /{tenant_id}/positions/last_update - Applications for a position:
GET /{tenant_id}/positions/{position_id}/applications/last_update
- Positions:
Save the time of your last successful run and use it as the start of your next one. If you want an extra safety check, run a full comparison occasionally (for example weekly) instead of nightly.
- Request only the data you need: Use moderate page sizes and avoid fetching detail for every record when a summary will do.
Manage request timing and recovery
- Pace your requests: Our APIs are transactional. Wait for a response before sending the next request and avoid sending large numbers of requests at once. If you send requests in batches, add a short pause between them.
- Schedule large jobs at quiet times: Run large or recurring jobs outside normal business hours across U.S. time zones whenever possible.
- Retry gracefully: If a request fails with a "too many requests" or server error (such as 429, 500, or 503), wait and try again, increasing the wait after each failure. Without retries, a busy period can cause missing data in your system.
Choose the right endpoint for the job
For integrations, use our authenticated APIs rather than public pages or endpoints designed for displaying content to visitors.
Need help or planning a large export?
If you are planning a one-time bulk export, or your integration is affected by rate limiting, please contact Interfolio Support at interfolio-support@elsevier.com or through the Client Community, or reach out to your Customer Success representative or Account Manager. We are glad to help you find the best approach.