Why are Integration Events rate-limited?

A rate-limit is necessary with Reactor Events due to the possibility of a mismatch between the message rate on the source Ably channel(s) and the sink function. If the aggregate channel message rate is greater than can be sustained by the receiver, then there will be a backlog of unprocessed messages that the end-user has no visibility of, or any way to manage.

For this reason, if you want to process high volumes of messages through Reactor Events, then we recommend using an intermediary queue, such as an AWS Kinesis queue, which would then handle any rate mismatch. You can configure streaming of events from Kinesis into the Lambda function (see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/with-kinesis.html). This allows far greater visibility into any backlog, and provides greater control over message handling; for example, message processing can be batched, stale messages can be discarded.

Further reading

• Find out about all connection, channel, message and rate limits on Ably accounts
• If you received an email about hitting a limit, find out what this means and what you can do about it
• Find out how to upgrade your account
• Get in touch if you would like to review your account limits or need help upgrading.