[SalesForce] How to limit API calls when using the Developer Console

In a Winter '14 Developer Edition and Spring '14 Pre-release I have noticed that using the Developer Console uses API calls. It looks like this affects third party tools like MavensMate as well. The limit for a Developer Edition is 5,000 / 24 hours and I've used about 125 in a 20 minute period. This is without running unit tests. Running unit tests burns through the API calls even quicker.

Add in another developer, code that uses the API, and frequent unit test execution and the limit can be hit without much effort.

Is there any configuration that I can make to not use as many API calls with the Developer Console? Perhaps, some features that I can disable?

It's possible that it is related to this Idea about the Tooling API and limits.

Best Answer

You can reduce your API usage by allowing your developer console session to "idle". Once idle, you'll only incur one API call per incident (such as saving a class, running a test). While not idle, the current implementation polls the server once every 6 seconds, or 10 API calls per minute while doing absolutely nothing.

Also, using the Force.com IDE will drastically reduce your API calls, because you won't suffer from the "monitoring" API calls. Believe it, it makes a big difference.

For those interested, I asked this myself on the Salesforce Community:

@Josh Kaplan (Salesforce.com), in addition to the code coverage glitches in the API, your comment https://success.salesforce.com/ideaView?id=08730000000kuJtAAI about retiring the setup pages in exchange for the Developer Console is worrisome. Today, using the console consumes one API call per six seconds per developer. Given that a normal developer org has 5,000 calls per day, this means that two developers working in the same organization (the maximum a normal developer edition supports) can only work for 4 hours a day actively in that organization before exhausting their daily usage limits. If we are required to use the console, we will be limited to working just a few hours a day inside the platform. Is there any plan to have the console no longer use API calls?

Josh Kaplan (SFDC PM) had this to say:

Starting with the coming release the number of API calls will dramatically decline. Results will be streamed, so polling will not consume so many API calls.

Presumably this applies to Spring '14.

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