Throttling limits for Azure Search

Question

I'm looking for throttling information and this is the best that I've been able to find so far: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-limits-quotas-capacity#throttling-limits

For doing a search

https://{{search-service}}.search.windows.net/indexes/:index/docs?api-version={{version}}&search=some text

Is this line from the reference page above the limit for searches?

Get Index (GET /indexes/myindex): 10 per second per search unit

I'm trying to see what the limit is for searching only under ideal scenario of nothing else happening such as an indexer running.

Bruce Johnston Bruce Johnston · Accepted Answer · 2019-11-09T23:50:11

Some APIs such as GET /indexes are throttled based on simple rate limits. However, queries and indexing requests do not work this way. In the case of those APIs, throttling happens dynamically based on resource availability. If the system's internal queues start to fill, requests will begin to fail with 503 (Service Unavailable). If enough such failures happen within a discrete period of time (calculated as an average over a rolling window), the service will throttle requests in order to relieve pressure and allow the system to recover.

The reason throttling works this way instead of based on static rate limits is that most Azure Cognitive Search pricing tiers (other than Free) give you dedicated capacity. Static rate limits could artificially limit how you use your own capacity, so instead throttling dynamically applies backpressure as a way to ensure the reliability of the service when its capacity is overloaded.

For more information about testing and performance tuning Azure Cognitive Search, see this article.

Throttling limits for Azure Search

2 Answers