Is there a per-project rate limit on the Google Drive API?

Question

I am working on a project that uploads many small text files to Google Drive using a service account. Despite what I set my per-user rate limit to in the API console (I have set it as high as 1,000,000 QPS), I still get 403 rateLimitExceeded repsonses after about 5 file insert requests in two seconds. The requests are authenticated. I can see in the response that Google is treating the requests as authenticated. I am frequently changing the QuotaUser on my requests to avoid accumulating too many requests for one user ID. I am also using exponential backoff to handle the 403 responses.

It appears as though there is a 1 QPS rate limit on the service as a whole. Is this the case? If so, is there any way to get around this?

Answer 1

Yes, there is a limit per project and per user. Google will happily increase these if you require. So, please make sure you fill out the quota increase form if you need to.

Some notes:

1. You must implement exponential backoff for rate limit errors
2. The default per-project rate limit is considerably higher than 1 QPS (by several orders of magnitude)
3. It would be hard to hit the rate limit without hitting the daily request limit of 10M