Overpass API performance issues

What documentation of this API in Qgis says about user agent? If nothing then reporting bug to whoever maintains it would be a good idea.
Though if problem is fixed in later release you will need to upgrade and if it is reported already - upvote or +1 it rather than creating a duplicate issue

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Just wanted to add another note of thanks for enforcing the rules, overpass turbo is much more usable of late.

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Just curious, how can I still copy the link at the bottom of


and use Wget on it, outside of Overpass Turbo?

If it’s a secret feel free to PM me.

I use about as much data as I have hair – no worry.

As a consistent (if small time) creator of qa tools, visualizations, and maps that use Overpass, thank you thank you thank you! The de instance is alive and well again! Woooo!

Please let me know where to send thank you cards, beers, pizzas, etc!

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wget should be able to set user agent, see it’s documentation

To set a custom User-Agent with wget, use --user-agent=AGENT (or the short version -U AGENT), for example:

wget -O - --user-agent=jidanni https://overpass-api.de/api/interpreter?data=...

But strangely enough, it seems that wget’s default user agent isn’t being blocked? I’m getting results without setting a custom user agent. I guess wget isn’t being used as much by bad actors?

For reference, based on wget -O - "https://httpbin.io/user-agent", my wget’s user agent is "Wget/1.21.4"

I’ve just tried it here, and right-clicking the link in the browser, and pasting the results after wget -O=result.txt worked for me. The link includes the details of the actual Overpass server being used. The one I’m using doesn’t currently have performance problems, but (see rest of thread above) the ones with global coverage are being restricted in terms of what and who they will server. If you do get an error, you’ll want to investigate what it actually says.

I believe that @jidanni is complaining observing that he can use Overpass with wget, not that he can’t.

That’s a correct observation. Neither curl nor wget are restricted at the moment. They do not seem to be the weapon of choice for the abusers. No promisses for the future, though. If you use them in scripts, always use the command line switch for adding a custom user agent. If you use them one-off manually, you’ll now know what to do if you suddenly get strange error messages.

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OK, it’s working again now, thanks.

I read a few threads on this subject and I confess I’m confused. Please clarify the exact problem. When did it manifest itself & have the restrictions which, I believe, have been in place for a while had any notable levels of success?

Exact problem is servers being overloaded, mostly by inept code.

Blocking bad traffic fixed problem, and intended use of overpass is now possible (as indicated by posts in this thread)

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The peak load on most or all public overpass servers is over their capacity. A significant portion of the load is from badly behaved automated queries.

It’s been getting worse over time so there’s no one time you can point at and say it was good before then and bad after. Roland did a SOTM EU 2025 talk about it and that is when the issues became wider known.

The anecdotal evidence here is that the restrictions placed about 20 days ago have helped.

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It looks like https://www.osmhydrant.org/ is also affected, as I can see a 406 Not Acceptable response.