facebook api open graph

Question

I wanted to display the share count of the articles on my blog (wordpress) to the readers. So I decided to call the api directly:

$fb_call = "https://graph.facebook.com/fql?q=SELECT%20share_count,%20total_count%20FROM%20link_stat%20WHERE%20url='".$url."'" ;
$response = wp_remote_request ( $fb_call  ) ;

This worked fine , when I test it myself. But at times, there are 100's of readers trying to access different posts at the same time, which results in an error - application request limit reached. The current limit seems to be 600 calls per 600 seconds, per token & per IP. It could be happening because the graph api is treating all these requests as if coming from the same user. So i need to add in an access token in the call. How do I generate the token without any login details server side, as the articles are shared using client side scripts, which I am not supposed to change. PHP SDK has a generate function, but I believe the user has to be logged in using that as well. Thanks for the help, and I apologize if the question is mundane/not organized.

Answer 1

You don´t need to "add a Token", you need to reduce the amount of API calls. You can´t just generate Tokens on the server anyway - except for an App Token, but you would need to create a separate App for that.

Anyway, the solution is much easier: You need to cache the results on your server - don´t use the same API call for every single user. It just does not scale. Also, it will make your Page faster - because every API call takes time. Last but not least: FQL is deprecated, it will stop working for all Apps very soon (August 7, 2016). You need to use the Graph API.