Linkerd · Rate Limits

Linkerd Rate Limits

Linkerd does not run as a SaaS — APIs are exposed on cluster (proxy admin on port 4191 per pod, control-plane gRPC services). There is no provider-side rate limit on Linkerd's APIs themselves; throughput is bounded by your Kubernetes cluster's CPU / memory / network. Linkerd does enforce circuit-breaking and retry budgets on the data plane; those are the rate-limit-like primitives users typically configure.

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

It captures 4 rate-limit definitions, measuring requests_per_second, retry_ratio, and consecutive_failures.

The profile also includes 4 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for circuitOpen and retriesExhausted.

Tagged areas include Rate Limiting, Service Mesh, Kubernetes, and Observability.

4 Limits
Rate LimitingService MeshKubernetesObservability

Limits

Proxy admin API (per pod) pod
requests_per_second
bounded by pod resource budget
Admin server on port 4191 per meshed pod. No documented hard rate cap; bound by CPU / memory allocated to the proxy container.
Control-plane gRPC APIs (Destination / Identity / Policy) cluster
requests_per_second
bounded by control-plane replica count and resource budget
Scale by adding control-plane replicas; not throttled by Linkerd itself.
Data-plane retry budget service
retry_ratio
0.2
Default retry budget is 20% of original request rate. Configurable via ServiceProfile / HTTPRoute retryBudget.
Circuit breaker (failure_accrual) endpoint
consecutive_failures
7
Default failure_accrual breaks an endpoint after a rolling window of consecutive 5xx responses; tunable per ServiceProfile.

Policies

Self-hosted, no provider quota
Linkerd runs in your cluster; there is no Buoyant- or Linkerd-side per-call quota. Cluster capacity is the limit.
Retry budget over fixed retries
Linkerd uses retry budgets (ratio of retries to original requests) rather than per-request max-retry counts to prevent retry storms.
Circuit breaking
failure_accrual circuit breaker takes failing endpoints out of rotation; configure per-route via HTTPRoute / ServiceProfile.
Timeouts
Per-route timeouts via HTTPRoute / ServiceProfile prevent slow upstreams from holding proxy resources.

Sources

Work with this as data

Every rate limit here is available over the APIs.io API and to AI agents over MCP.

MCP server

One button, every client — Claude, Cursor, VS Code and the rest.

https://apis.io/mcp

Tools for rate limits

4 MCP tools reach this
  • find_rate_limitsBrowse and filter every rate limit in the catalog.
  • apis_io_searchSTART HERE — APIs, providers and tags for one query, each with its total.
  • resolveTurn a domain, URL or GitHub org into the provider it belongs to.
  • find_cohortsEvery scored population of providers in the catalog.
All 92 tools →

Call it yourself

curl for this page
This rate limit 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits/linkerd-rate-limits"
All rate limits 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits?limit=25"

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