# How fast can you get a new tweet? We measured X's delay

> We measured how long X takes to show a new tweet on the author's timeline, on list timelines and for replies. Where you look matters more than how often you poll.

HTML page: https://www.twittrapi.com/blog/how-fast-new-tweets-appear
Published 2026-10-30.

If you trade on tweets or alert on them, the question is not only how often you poll. X itself takes a moment before a new tweet shows up, and that delay depends on where you look. We measured it.

**Short answer:** a logged-in request for the author's own timeline sees a new tweet about 1 second after it is posted. A list timeline shows it after about 4 to 8 seconds. Replies to other people often reach list timelines only 10 to 80 seconds later. If you need tweets within seconds, read the author's timeline, or use a monitor that does it for you.

## What we measured

On 2026-10-24 and 2026-10-25 we watched busy public accounts and recorded, for every new tweet, the first moment each source returned it. The posting time comes from the tweet ID: X's IDs contain the creation time to the millisecond, so no clock on X's side has to be trusted.

| Where you look | First seen after posting |
| --- | --- |
| The author's timeline (UserTweets), logged in | about 0.7 to 1.3 s |
| A list timeline with the author as a member | about 4 to 8 s |
| A list timeline, polled every 5 s (what a poller sees) | about 4 to 14 s, median about 8.5 s |
| A list timeline, replies to other accounts | often 10 to 80 s |

Two things stand out:

- **The source sets the floor.** Polling a list every second does not make it faster than about 4 seconds, because X has not put the tweet there yet.
- **Replies are the slow case.** Plain posts and quotes reach lists within seconds. Replies in someone else's thread can take more than a minute. In one case a reply reached the list 82 seconds after it was posted.

## Measure it yourself

Every tweet ID carries its creation time. Shift the ID 22 bits to the right and add X's epoch, and you have milliseconds since 1970:

```python
import time

TWITTER_EPOCH_MS = 1288834974657

def posted_at_ms(tweet_id: str) -> int:
    return (int(tweet_id) >> 22) + TWITTER_EPOCH_MS

def delay_seconds(tweet_id: str) -> float:
    return (time.time() * 1000 - posted_at_ms(tweet_id)) / 1000

print(round(delay_seconds("2115664319278973255"), 1))
```

Call `delay_seconds` the moment your code first sees a tweet. That is your real end-to-end delay: X's own delay plus your poll interval plus your processing. The `createdAt` field has only second precision, so use the ID. The free [tweet ID to date tool](https://www.twittrapi.com/tools/tweet-id-to-date) does the same in the browser.

## What this means for your setup

**One account, a few seconds are fine:** poll the author's timeline every few seconds. With TwittrAPI that is one call per poll to [`/user/{userId}/tweets`](https://www.twittrapi.com/docs/endpoints/users), billed at $0.10 per 1,000 calls.

**Many accounts:** polling every author's timeline every second gets expensive fast. 100 accounts once per second are 8.64 million calls a day.

**Replies matter to you:** read the author's timeline including replies, or you will see some of them a minute late.

## The shortcut: account monitoring

This is what our monitor does. You add the accounts, and every new tweet arrives at your webhook as a signed `POST`, or through the pull API. Each account is checked as often as its class says, whatever its size:

| Class | Guarantee | Typical |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Standard | We check at least every 60 s | 15–60 s |
| Fast | We check at least every 5 s | 2–5 s |
| Real-time | We check at least every 1 s | 0.5–1 s |

The class is the delivery time after X makes the post available. Every event carries `tweetCreatedAt` and `detectedAt`, so you can check our numbers with the snippet above instead of trusting them.

The [webhook guide](https://www.twittrapi.com/blog/twitter-webhook-new-tweets) sets it up in Python in a few minutes. For trading alerts, see [crypto Twitter alerts](https://www.twittrapi.com/blog/crypto-twitter-alerts). Monitors have a monthly plan, and calls to `/monitors/*` are not billed per request.

## FAQ

**Why is the author's timeline faster than a list?**
We do not know X's internals. We only see the result: the author's timeline is served from fresh data, while list timelines are assembled a few seconds later. The numbers above are what X returned during our measurement. They can change when X changes its systems.

**Is search faster?**
Search with the Latest tab was not part of this measurement, so we give no number for it.

**Can I get a tweet before X shows it anywhere?**
No. Every method reads what X has made available. The question is only how soon after that you see it.

**How do I measure the delay of a provider I already use?**
Log the tweet ID and the time your code receives the tweet, then apply `posted_at_ms`. Look at the median and at the slowest 10 percent, not at the best case.