Limits#

All accounts, by default, have a preconfigured set of thresholds, or limits, to manage capacity and prevent abuse of the system. The system recognizes two kinds of limits: rate limits and absolute limits. Rate limits are thresholds that are reset after a certain amount of time passes. Absolute limits are fixed. Rate limits are processed via the Repose service.

Note

If the default limits are too low for your particular application, contact Rackspace Cloud support to request an increase. All requests require reasonable justification.

The system recognizes the following types of limits:

rate limits. Control the frequency at which the user can issue specific API requests. See Rate Limits.
absolute limits. Control the total number of specific objects that the user can possess simultaneously. See Absolute Limits.

To query the limits programmatically, see Retrieve list of rate and absolute limits.

Rate Limits#

Rate limits control the frequency at which the user can issue specific API requests.

Rate limits are reset after a certain amount of time passes. To request a rate limit increase, contact Rackspace.

Rate limits are specified in terms of both a human-readable wildcard URI and a machine-processable regular expression. The regular expression boundary matcher ^ for the rate limit takes effect after the root URI path. For example, the regular expression ^/servers would match the resources portion of the following URI:

https://dfw.servers.api.rackspacecloud.com/v2/010101/servers

The following table lists the default rate limits:

**Default rate limits**#
Method	URI	Default Limit
GET	`*`	1000 per minute
GET	`/servers/{id}/os-virtual-interfacesv2`	25 per minute
POST	`*`	100 per minute
POST	`/os-networksv2`	100 per day
POST	`/servers *`	1000 per day
POST	`/servers/{id}/os-virtual-interfacesv2`	4 per minute

Rate limits are applied in order relative to the method, going from least to most specific. If you exceed the limits established for your account, a 413 (Rate Control) HTTP response is returned with a Retry-After header to notify the client when it can attempt to try again.

To find your current account settings for these limits, see Retrieve list of limits including used limits.

Absolute Limits#

Absolute limits control the total number of specific objects that the user can possess simultaneously.

Specify absolute limits to limit the overall number of items or amount of capacity in the system. Absolute limits also include the amount of resources currently consumed, which allow for programmatic visibility of usage.

Specify absolute limits as name/value pairs.

The following Default limits show the maximum amount of a resource that can be used:

**Absolute limits**#
Name	Description	Default
maxImageMeta	The maximum number of metadata key value pairs associated with a particular image	40
maxPersonality	The maximum number of file path/content pairs that can be supplied on server build and rebuild	5
maxPersonalitySize	The maximum size, in bytes, for each personality file	1000
maxServerMeta	The maximum number of metadata key value pairs associated with a particular server	40
maxTotalCores	This limit is disabled, so no limits exist on the total number of cores	-1
maxTotalInstances	The maximum number of Cloud Servers at any one time	100
maxTotalPrivateNetworks	The maximum number of isolated networks that you can create. Set to 0 when Cloud Networks is disabled, 10 when Cloud Networks enabled	10
maxTotalRAMSize	The maximum total amount of RAM (MB) of all Cloud Servers at any time	131072

The following total limits show current usage:

totalCoresUsed: The total number of cores used.
totalInstancesUsed: The total number of Cloud Servers.
totalRAMUsed: The total amount of RAM (GB) used for all Cloud Servers.