Etcd · Rate Limits

Etcd Rate Limits

etcd is self-hosted open-source software, so there is no upstream "service" rate limit. etcd does enforce its own resource caps (max-request-bytes, quota-backend-bytes, max-concurrent-streams) that act as throttling/safety mechanisms; the actual request throughput is limited by hardware (disk fsync latency dominates) and by the Raft protocol's serialization of writes. The values below describe configurable etcd guardrails rather than a vendor quota.

Etcd Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for Etcd on the APIs.io network, conforming to the API Commons Rate Limits specification.

It captures 4 rate-limit definitions, measuring bytes_per_request, bytes_storage, concurrent_streams, and requests_per_second.

The profile also includes 3 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for resourceExhausted and unavailable.

Tagged areas include Rate Limiting, Distributed Systems, Key-Value Store, and Open Source.

4 Limits
Rate LimitingDistributed SystemsKey-Value StoreOpen Source

Limits

max-request-bytes server
bytes_per_request
1572864
Default 1.5 MiB per request; configurable.
quota-backend-bytes cluster
bytes_storage
2147483648
Default 2 GiB DB quota; raise to 8 GiB max safe; cluster goes read-only when exceeded.
max-concurrent-streams server
concurrent_streams
4294967295
gRPC max-concurrent-streams; effectively unbounded by default.
Operator-imposed throttle client
requests_per_second
operator-defined via client-side rate limiting or proxy

Policies

Linearizable reads
Linearizable reads require quorum; degrade to serializable reads to lower load when consistency tolerates it.
Compaction and defragmentation
Schedule periodic compaction of revisions and defrag to keep DB size under quota-backend-bytes.
Backoff
On RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED or UNAVAILABLE, clients should apply exponential backoff with jitter and avoid retry storms.

Sources