I've hit a max rate messages limit, what does this mean?

This means you've sent enough messages within the last second to surpass your limit or to be warned about your usage. Messages include most actions within Ably, such as messages, presence published & received, and history, find out more.

There are two types of messages limit you can hit:

• messages.maxRate.warning - when you reach 50% of your quota.
• messages.maxRate.hard - when the hard limit on the account has been exceeded. Messages will now be suppressed until the second is over.

If you need the ability to send more messages, we recommend you upgrade your account.

How are instantaneous rate limits implemented?

An instantaneous rate limit is calculated based on the current rate of the operation per second. For example: if a self-service package can publish at most 200 messages per second to their Ably Reactor queues and you exceed this, messages above that point will be suppressed. This is done on a rolling probabilistic basis; for example, if you have a queue rule that attempts to publish 400 messages per second to a queue, each one will have a 50% chance of being rejected, with the suppression probability being continuously updated based on the current attempted publish rate.

Please see this page for more information on all our limits