status
This site is one machine in a house, reading Steam with a key that has a daily allowance. When something here is slow or refuses, it is almost always one of the three below.
Reading…
Every visitor’s lookup spends the same key, which is mine, and it is capped per day. Running out does not take the site down: it keeps answering everything it already knows and stops learning new profiles until midnight UTC.
The market, the inventories and the profile pages are the half of Steam with no API, and that half answers a burst with a refusal. While it cools, card prices and inventories fill in slowly and nothing else is affected.
A game enters the first figure because somebody who owned it was looked up here, so that is not the size of Steam - it is how much of Steam has been through this site. The catalogue index is the other kind: it is synced whole, on a timer, and it is what the lookup field reads.
the weeks before this one
Not people. An address is what gets counted, and the two do not line up in either direction: a carrier network behind one address is a hundred readers, and one reader on wifi, on a phone and behind a VPN is three. The digest that recognises an address is replaced every seven days, and the old one is deleted rather than kept.