Usage Quota

To prevent errant or resource-intensive scripts from negatively impacting the availability of the service, Earth Engine has a per user quota on concurrent queries. There are separate limits for computation requests (that is, requests with paths that begin with /api/…) and map tile requests (that is, requests with paths that begin with /map/…).

Warning: Quota restrictions exist to ensure the availability of computing resources for the entire Earth Engine community. Attempting to circumvent quota restrictions through the use of multiple Google accounts is a violation of the Earth Engine Terms of Service.

Service accounts and quota

Applications that proxy API requests through a single service account are subject to the same concurrent request quota as individual users. If the quota is exceeded, Earth Engine may return HTTP 429: Too Many Requests errors. Generally, these errors are handled by the Earth Engine client library, which wraps requests in exponential backoff, retrying the query until it succeeds. The Earth Engine client library will retry the request five times. To help avoid receiving 429 errors, you may want to enable caching for your application, for example using memcache, to avoid redundant queries when possible. If using an older version of the Earth Engine client library that does not retry queries automatically, or if a query is still not completed after five retries, you may need to implement exponential backoff around requests.

In special cases, we may raise the limits for specific uses. Contact [e-mail] if your app is consistently hitting request limits and you would like to be considered for a quota increase.

App Engine deadlines

Although recent versions of the Earth Engine client library retry queries for you, computationally intensive queries may take longer than App Engine deadlines. Specifically, you may need to increase the default deadline for queries to external endpoints by specifying a urlfetch deadline as shown in this example. Another approach is to wrap the App Engine requests in exponential backoff. For example, you can use the Python backoff library to decorate get calls. Note: these deadlines are App Engine limits (not Earth Engine limits), but strategies to deal with them are presented here for convenience. See this article for more details.