Salesforce API 10 request limit

Question

I read somewhere that the Salesforce API has a 10 request limit. If we write code to integrate with Salesforce: 1. What is the risk of this limit 2. How can we write code to negate this risk?

My real concern is that I don't want to build our customer this great standalone website that integrates with Salesforce only to have user 11 and 12 kicked out to wait until requests 1-10 are complete?

Edit: Some more details on the specifics of the limitation can be found at http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/api/Content/implementation_considerations.htm. Look at the section titled limits.

"Limits There is a limit on the number of queries that a user can execute concurrently. A user can have up to 10 query cursors open at a time. If 10 QueryLocator cursors are open when a client application, logged in as the same user, attempts to open a new one, then the oldest of the 10 cursors is released. This results in an error in the client application. Multiple client applications can log in using the same username argument. However, this increases your risk of getting errors due to query limits. If multiple client applications are logged in using the same user, they all share the same session. If one of the client applications calls logout(), it invalidates the session for all the client applications. Using a different user for each client application makes it easier to avoid these limits.*"

Answer 1

It seems like you're referring to the governor limits and they are all listed in the Apex documentation. These limits apply to code running in a given Apex transaction (i.e. in response to a trigger/web service call etc), so combining more users won't hurt you as each transaction gets its own allocation of resources.

Limits are also present on the number of long-running concurrent API requests and total API calls in a day. Most of these are per-license, so, again, as the number of users rises, so do the limits.