Earth Engine limits the number of requests that a specific user can send per second.
This policy helps ensure that errant or resource-intensive scripts do not negatively impact
the availability of the service. 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/…).
Maximum queries per second
Computation requests are limited at 3 QPS (queries per second). However, we allow a spike of up to 40 queries. In other words, you get 40 initial tokens, and 3 more every second. Map tile requests are limited to 60 sustained QPS, with initial 300 tokens.
Service accounts and quota
The limits are per user, so applications that proxy API requests and funnel them all through a single service account have their total QPS limited to a single account’s quota.
Handling QPS limits in your app
When your QPS is exceeded, you will receive HTTP 429: Too Many Requests
responses. In your application, you should handle these 429s with
truncated exponential back-off.
To avoid receiving these, ensure your application uses caching, for example
memcache, to avoid redundant queries when possible.
In rare cases, we may raise the limits for specific users. Contact earthengine@google.com if you’re consistently hitting quota limits and would like to be considered for a quota increase.
