What are the potential pitfalls of making frequent requests to an external API like blockchain.info in PHP?

One potential pitfall of making frequent requests to an external API like blockchain.info in PHP is that it can lead to rate limiting or throttling by the API provider, causing your requests to be denied or delayed. To solve this issue, you can implement caching to store the API responses locally and only make requests to the external API when necessary. 

// Check if the response is already cached
$cache_key = 'blockchain_api_response';
$cache_time = 60; // Cache response for 60 seconds
$api_response = apc_fetch($cache_key);

if (!$api_response) {
    // Make request to external API
    $api_response = file_get_contents('https://blockchain.info/api');

    // Cache the API response
    apc_store($cache_key, $api_response, $cache_time);
}

// Process the API response
$data = json_decode($api_response, true);

Keywords

rate limiting API throttling connection timeout error handling caching

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