When setting up a gather with a large number of accounts (100+) or a long date range (multiple months), it is important to make some considerations to avoid overloading the platform. If a single gather attempts to collect too much data, the process has been set to automatically time out after 3 hours and discontinue the gather process. This means the gather will stop midway, and there is no way to resume it. You will have to restart the gather from the beginning, which results in additional waiting time and credits.
To prevent this issue, we recommend splitting your gather into smaller chunks before running it.
Recommended Limits
- Accounts: A maximum of 100 accounts per gather
- Date Range: Limit the gather to one month at a time if you are collecting historical data
- Key Words: Limit the number of posts per keyword, ideally less than 1000
- Comments: Limit comment gather to no more than 2000 posts
How to Split Your Gather and Process
- Divide by Accounts: If your project has more than 100 handles, group them into batches (e.g., Batch 1: 1-100 accounts, Batch 2: 100-200 accounts)
- Divide by Time Period: For multi-month projects, create one Gather per month
- Run Sequentially: Start one gather, wait for it to finish, then launch the next. Avoid running too many large gathers at once. Once you have completed all your gather, then proceed to Classification
- Gathering Comments: When gathering large comments we recommend to split them to max 2000 posts and name them according to the month the posts are from (e.g., comments 2000/10000 from FB posts Nov 2025, comments 4000/10000 from FB posts Nov 2025)
Remember: a gather that exceeds the recommended size will stop automatically after 3 hours, and you will need to start over.