Question

I’ve seen the 600 calls / 600 seconds rate limit mentioned by some (e.g. on quora).

What I want to know is whether I am allowed to do 600 batch requests in 600 secs (a batch request consists of up to 50 requests).

Answer 1

You should handle the rate limiting programmatically by checking for the following error message. You should then put in a time-wait loop before your next call if you encounter the error. One of my high traffic applications accounts watches for this error and will slow down.

From: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/bestpractices/

Rate limited (API_EC_TOO_MANY_CALLS) If your application is making too many calls, the API server might rate limit you automatically,
returning an “API_EC_TOO_MANY_CALLS” error. Generally, this should not
happen. If it does, it is because your application has been determined
to be making too many API calls. Iterate on your code so you’re making
as few calls as possible in order to maintain the user experience
needed. You should also avoid complicated FQL queries. To understand
if your application is being throttled, go to Insights and click
“Throttling”.

edit

As reported by Igy in the comment thread, each request in that batch counts as 1. For your example of 600 being the max limit, that means you can fire off 15 batch requests containing 50 calls each.