What is the Transloadit Rate Limiter?

A system protecting customers by limiting Assembly creation to 250 per minute and 2,500 concurrent Assemblies by default. By default, each Assembly can spend up to 8 hours uploading and then another 8 hours executing. Rejections use RATE_LIMIT_REACHED with an info.retryIn delay in seconds. Limits can be adjusted upon request.

How the Rate Limiter works

A rate limiter is the enforcing component behind one or more rate-limit policies. It observes work admitted under a chosen key, compares that work with independent budgets, and then accepts, delays, or rejects new work. Separating submission, concurrency, and phase-duration budgets prevents a client from satisfying one dimension while exhausting another. Integrations should treat the current product values and rejection shape in the API reference as the authoritative contract instead of copying them into local scheduling code.

Key facts

  1. A creation budget governs admission over time, while a concurrency budget governs work that remains active; a client scheduler must account for both independently.
  2. Upload and execution are distinct processing phases. Long work in either phase can retain concurrency capacity even when the recent submission rate is low.
  3. Retry behavior belongs to the service contract: clients should recognize the documented rejection signal and honor its supplied delay instead of retrying immediately.

When the Rate Limiter matters

Keep submission rate and concurrency within the documented limits, or arrange an adjustment before a predictable traffic surge. Treat a rejection as backpressure: stop new submissions, wait the number of seconds in the error’s info.retryIn field, and resume gradually. Uncontrolled immediate retries only add attempts without completing media work.

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