Pixie · Rate Limits

Pixie Rate Limits

Pixie is an Apache-2.0 open-source observability tool. The Pixie API surface (gRPC Cloud API, PxL Script API, Plugin System API) is consumed against either a self-hosted Pixie Cloud or the community-hosted Pixie Cloud. The project does not publish numeric per-key rate limits; throughput is governed by the deployment's own resource allocation and any fair-use limits the community-hosted environment chooses to enforce.

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

It captures 2 rate-limit definitions, measuring varies.

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

Tagged areas include Rate Limiting, Observability, Kubernetes, and Open Source.

2 Limits
Rate LimitingObservabilityKubernetesOpen Source

Limits

Self-Hosted Pixie Cloud deployment
varies
bounded by user-deployed resources; no project-published per-second numeric
Throughput depends on the size of the Pixie Cloud and Vizier components in your cluster.
Community-Hosted Pixie Cloud organization
varies
fair-use; not publicly documented
The community-hosted control plane applies soft fair-use limits to prevent abuse. Sustained heavy users are encouraged to self-host.

Policies

Self-Hosting
For predictable throughput, deploy your own Pixie Cloud + Vizier rather than relying on the community-hosted control plane.
PxL Script Sampling
PxL scripts that aggregate over the in-memory eBPF table are constrained by the retention window of that table (typically tens of seconds to minutes); design queries to sample rather than full-scan large clusters.
Backoff
On 503 responses, retry with exponential backoff and jitter.

Sources