This was my understanding of the service, but I haven't tried using it in 3+ years. Things may have changed. It depends on what you're doing. Most users use it

This was my understanding of the service, but I haven't tried using it in 3+ years. Things may have changed. It depends on what you're doing. Most users use it as a simple, time independent trigger mechanism. IE: when they post to twitter, IFTTT picks that up and reposts to tumblr. Most popular use cases are not time sensitive or high throughput. I once heard a fellow programmer say IFTTT was not designed for people like us. Those two caveats are why. Time sensitive use cases, like getting text messages when it's going to rain, don't work well. Neither do high throughput tasks like filtering the HN firehose.