I've been running my API fine for some time now and when I added another function I realized I was being told to backoff.  I only run my API once a night and don't really pull that much data.  I have a registered key that I use as well.  It returns the proper counts and I was less than 1000 out of 10000 attempts in when it initially told me to backoff.  Now, it tells me every single time to backoff for 54 seconds, regardless.  I also noticed that my APP statistics shows no data, even though I have confirmed my API key is working appropriately.  Not sure if this is related or not.

I guess my question is, how do I find out why I am being throttled on my API?

Below is a sample url request and result:

*https://api.stackexchange.com/2.1/questions?order=desc&page=$page&sort=creation&site=stackoverflow&key=".urlencode($key)."&filter=".urlencode($filter);*

**["quota_remaining"]=>   int(8099)   
["quota_max"]=>   int(10000)   
["backoff"]=>   int(54)   
["has_more"]=>   bool(true)**

I'm following the backoff rules and sleeping for ( backoff + 5 ) seconds.  Adding +5 just to be safe.  But it doesn't reduce or change on each and every API query now.  Almost as if I've been tagged as spamming or an internal blacklist.