I recently switched from Google Chrome to Brave browser. I have used Brave for ages but always as a secondary browser and not my primary.
One of the plug-ins I use is SteemPlus. I don't use a lot of the functionality and turn off most of it, but one of the things I really like and the main reason I use it is for this.
For the week or so I've been having 2-5 minute outages where I am apparently rate limited from api.steemit.com. I don't run any scripts on my machine, they are all run on servers off my LAN so I know it isn't a bad script or anything. It's been driving me crazy the last few days.
Every so often (and happening more and more) I would be unable to do anything on Steemit, Steempeak, even Steemproposals. The common link was api.steemit.com node. So I went directly to it and see that I was rate limited.
After some digging, I can see I am spamming requests for "get_blog_entries".
Looking at each request I can see it is some form of get_blog_entries
{"id":462,"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"call","params":["follow_api","get_blog_entries",["themarkymark",800,100]]}
This just returns a bunch of old blog entries and from what I understand is not a query that condenser does on it's own.
It takes a lot of requests to actually get rate limited but it has been happening in just a minute or two.
SteemPlus was the most likely culprit as it layers additional requests over condenser. I managed to reproduce the issue and confirm it is related to Steemplus.
While the extension is running, if I sniff my SSL traffic I can see the requests coming in fast and furious. If I disable the extension and hit refresh, I get 6 requests to api.steemit.com which is expected behavior.
If I then turn the extension on again, I see the spam immediately.
I noticed I am able to reproduce the problem best if I goto recent_replies page which means it may be related the insane amount of spam I get in response to my abuse fighting.
For now, I turned off SteemPlus and contacted @stoodkev for an answer. Hit me up or leave a comment if you are having similar issues.