Health Gorilla · Rate Limits

Health Gorilla Rate Limits

Health Gorilla publishes no request-rate ceiling and no rate-limit response headers. The full reference documentation was searched — the HTTP Status Codes page enumerates 400, 401, 403, 404, 409, 422, 500 and 503 and does not list 429 at all, and no X-RateLimit-*, RateLimit-* or Retry-After header appears anywhere in the reference. What Health Gorilla does publish are three concrete operational limits: a cap on active event subscriptions, a webhook delivery retry schedule with an auto-disable rule, and pagination defaults. Those are recorded below with their real values. Per-client request throttling, if any, is governed by the onboarding agreement and is not documented publicly.

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

It captures 7 rate-limit definitions, measuring subscriptions, delivery attempts, consecutive failures, interval, and results per page.

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

Tagged areas include Health, Interoperability, FHIR, Clinical Data, and Lab Ordering.

7 Limits
HealthInteroperabilityFHIRClinical DataLab OrderingRate LimitingQuotasThrottling

Limits

Active Subscriptions client
subscriptions
30
Health Gorilla allows 30 active FHIR Subscriptions by default. Requests that exceed the cap return 422 Unprocessable Entity.
Webhook Delivery Retries subscription
delivery attempts
4
Exponential backoff across four attempts. After the final attempt the event is discarded and is never redelivered.
Subscription Auto-Disable subscription
consecutive failures
10
A subscription is disabled when the last successful delivery is 3 days or older and delivery has failed more than 10 times, or when no successful delivery has ever occurred and delivery has failed more than 20 times. Once disabled it must be re-enabled before notifications resume.
Subscription Redelivery Interval subscription
interval
15 minutes
Failed notifications are retried at 15-minute intervals until delivery succeeds or the subscription is disabled.
Search Page Size request
results per page
not fixed
Default page size varies by resource type. Health Gorilla names _count=1000 as an example of an excessive page size to avoid. The ADT subscription search documents a _count default of 100.
API Requests client
requests
not published
No per-second, per-minute or per-day request ceiling is published. Any per-client throttling is governed by the onboarding agreement.
Idempotency Key Retention request
replay window
typically up to 1 hour
Not a rate limit, but the window that governs safe retry. A replayed POST with the same HG-Idempotency-Key and payload inside this window returns the original response.

Policies

Asynchronous Retrieval
Long-running federated queries such as $p360-retrieve return 202 Accepted and are polled for completed, partial or failed status rather than held open on a synchronous connection. This is the mechanism that keeps large record retrievals off the synchronous request path.
Cursor Pagination
Search and $everything responses page via an opaque server-generated _cursor carried on Bundle.link.next. Offset paging is discouraged for large datasets.
Client Backoff
With no documented 429 or Retry-After, clients should apply exponential backoff with jitter on 500 and 503 responses and on timeouts. Health Gorilla documents 503 as "temporarily unavailable" and 500 as "try again later".

Sources