Quotas and limits

This document lists the quotas and limits that apply to Cloud Natural Language.

A quota restricts how much of a shared Google Cloud resource your Google Cloud project can use, including hardware, software, and network components. Therefore, quotas are a part of a system that does the following:

  • Monitors your use or consumption of Google Cloud products and services.
  • Restricts your consumption of those resources, for reasons that include ensuring fairness and reducing spikes in usage.
  • Maintains configurations that automatically enforce prescribed restrictions.
  • Provides a means to request or make changes to the quota.

In most cases, when a quota is exceeded, the system immediately blocks access to the relevant Google resource, and the task that you're trying to perform fails. In most cases, quotas apply to each Google Cloud project and are shared across all applications and IP addresses that use that Google Cloud project.

To increase or decrease most quotas, use the Google Cloud console. For more information, see Request a higher quota.

There are also limits on Natural Language resources. These limits are unrelated to the quota system. Limits cannot be changed unless otherwise stated.

Language restrictions

The Natural Language API currently supports only the languages listed in Language Support.

Content quotas

Content to the Natural Language API is provided as a text string. The Natural Language API processes this text into a series of tokens, which roughly correspond to word boundaries. All Natural Language API features (Sentiment Analysis, Entity Extraction, and Syntactic Analysis) use these tokens as the building blocks for performing analysis on the provided text.

The API contains the following quotas on the size of this content for each request:

Content Quota Value Overflow Result
Text Content 1,000,000 bytes API Error
Token Quota 100,000 tokens Ignored
Entity Mentions 5,000* Ignored

Attempting to process content in excess of the Text Content quota will produce an error. Attempting to process tokens in excess of the Token Quota will not produce an error, but any tokens over that quota will be ignored.

Note that byte counts may not reflect character counts, depending on the encoding used within the text content.

* The Entity Mentions quota includes not only returned mentions within the document, but any noun references to those entities, including pronouns. Note that those pronouns are not returned directly in the mentions field, though they do count against the quota.

Request quotas

The current API usage quotas for the Cloud Natural Language API are as follows (and are subject to change):

Type of Quota Usage Quota
Requests per minute 600
Requests per day 800,000