Pub/Sub quotas and limits

Google Cloud uses quotas to restrict how much of a particular shared Google Cloud resource that you can use. Each quota represents a specific countable resource, such as API calls to a particular service, the number of bytes sent to a particular service, or the number of streaming connections used concurrently by your project.

Many services also have limits that are unrelated to the quota system. These are fixed constraints, such as maximum message sizes or the number of Pub/Sub resources you can create in a project, which cannot be increased or decreased.

View and manage quotas

For a given project, you can use the IAM & admin quotas dashboard to view current quota limits and usage. You can also use this dashboard to do the following:

  • Reduce your quota limits
  • Initiate a process to apply for higher quota limits

For more information about monitoring and alerting on your quota usage, see Monitoring.

Quota usage attribution

For push subscriber throughput, quota usage is charged against the project that contains the push subscription. This is the project that appears in the name of the subscription.

For all other quotas, usage is charged against the project associated with the credentials specified in the request. The quota usage is not charged against the project that contains the requested resource.

For example: If a service account in project A sends a publish request to publish to a topic in project B, the quota is charged to project A. In some cases, you might want quota usage to be charged against another project. You can use the X-Goog-User-Project system parameter to change the project for quota attribution. To know more about X-Goog-User-Project, see System parameters.

You can use gcloud CLI to set the project for quota attribution for a specific request. The gcloud CLI sends the X-Goog-User-Project request header.

You must have the roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageConsumer role or a custom role with the serviceusage.services.use permission on the project that you are going to use for quota attribution.

The following example shows how to get a list of subscriptions in the project RESOURCE_PROJECT while charging the Administrator operations quota against the project QUOTA_PROJECT. Run the following command in your Google Cloud CLI terminal:

gcloud pubsub subscriptions list --project=
RESOURCE_PROJECT --billing-project=
QUOTA_PROJECT

Replace QUOTA_PROJECT with the ID of the Google Cloud project against which you want to charge quota.

Note that in Pub/Sub, the billed project is always the one that contains the resource. You can change the project only for quota attribution.

Pub/Sub quotas

The quotas listed in the following table can be viewed and edited on a per-project basis in the APIs and services quotas dashboard.

Regional quotas are divided into 3 types:

  • Large regions: europe-west1, europe-west4, us-central1, us-east1, us-east4, us-west1, us-west2
  • Medium regions: asia-east1, asia-northeast1, asia-southeast1, europe-west2, europe-west3
  • Small regions: all other regions

Exactly-once delivery quotas are region specific. Check the details for each region in the following table.

Quota Default quota limit Description
Publisher throughput per region
  • 240,000,000 kB per minute (4 GB/s) in large regions
  • 48,000,000 kB per minute (800 MB/s) in medium regions
  • 12,000,000 kB per minute (200 MB/s) in small regions

pubsub.googleapis.com/regionalpublisher

Quota usage is based on the size of the published PubsubMessages:

Note that multiple messages can be included in a single publish request, and there is no additional quota charge per message.

Pull subscriber throughput per region
  • 240,000,000 kB per minute (4 GB/s) in large regions
  • 48,000,000 kB per minute (800 MB/s) in medium regions
  • 24,000,000 kB per minute (400 MB/s) in small regions

pubsub.googleapis.com/regionalsubscriber

Quota usage is based on the size of the returned PubsubMessages:

Acknowledger throughput per region
  • 240,000,000 kB per minute (4 GB/s) in large regions
  • 48,000,000 kB per minute (800 MB/s) in medium regions
  • 24,000,000 kB per minute (400 MB/s) in small regions

pubsub.googleapis.com/regionalacknowledger

Quota usage is based on the size of Acknowledge and ModifyAckDeadline requests:

Push and export subscriber throughput per region
  • 8,400,000 kB per minute (140 MB/s) in large regions
  • 4,200,000 kB per minute (70 MB/s) in medium regions
  • 2,400,000 kB per minute (40 MB/s) in small regions

pubsub.googleapis.com/regionalpushsubscriber

For push delivery requests made to the push endpoint, quota usage is based on the size of the PubsubMessages sent to the push endpoint.

StreamingPull subscriber throughput per region
  • 240,000,000 kB per minute (4 GB/s) in large regions
  • 48,000,000 kB per minute (800 MB/s) in medium regions
  • 24,000,000 kB per minute (400 MB/s) in small regions

pubsub.googleapis.com/regionalstreamingpullsubscriber

Quota usage is based on the size of the PubsubMessages streamed to the subscriber:

Note that Client Libraries use StreamingPull operations where possible.

Number of open StreamingPull connections per region
  • 72,000 open connections at a time in large regions
  • 48,000 open connections at a time in medium regions
  • 24,000 open connections at a time in small regions

pubsub.googleapis.com/regionalstreamingpullconnections

The number of open StreamingPull connections at any given time. See StreamingPull.

Administrator operations 6,000 per minute (100 ops/s)

pubsub.googleapis.com/administrator

Each administrator operation, such as GetTopicRequest, charges one unit against this quota.

Get*, List*, Create*, Delete*, Update*, ModifyPushConfig, SetIamPolicy, GetIamPolicy, TestIamPermissions, ValidateSchema, ValidateMessage,CommitSchema,RollbackSchema, DeleteSchemaRevision, ListSchemaRevisions, and DetachSubscription are administrator operations.

Number of messages consumed from subscriptions with exactly-once delivery enabled per region
  • 1,000,000 messages per minute in us-central1
  • 700,000 messages per minute in us-east1
  • 300,000 messages per minute in us-west1
  • 180,000 messages per minute in other regions

pubsub.googleapis.com/exactlyoncedeliveredmessagecount

Quota usage is based on the number of PubsubMessages consumed by the subscriber:

Number of messages acknowledged or whose deadline is extended when using subscriptions with exactly-once delivery enabled per region
  • 10,000,000 messages per minute in us-central1
  • 7,000,000 messages per minute in us-east1
  • 3,000,000 messages per minute in us-west1
  • 1,800,000 messages per minute in other regions

pubsub.googleapis.com/exactlyonceackcount

Quota usage is based on the number of acknowledgment IDs in Acknowledge and ModifyAckDeadline requests:

Throughput quota units

Throughput quota usage is measured in 1kB units. 1 kB is 1000 bytes. For example, in a PublishRequest with 105 messages of 50 bytes each, the user data size is 105 * 50 bytes = 5250 bytes, so the quota usage is max(1kB, ceil(5250 bytes/1000)) = 6kB.

Resource limits

Resource Limits
Project 10,000 topics
10,000 attached or detached subscriptions
5,000 snapshots
10,000 schemas
Topic 10,000 attached subscriptions
5,000 attached snapshots
If topic message retention is configured, messages published to a topic can be retained in persistent storage for up to 31 days from the time of publication.
Subscription By default, retains unacknowledged messages in persistent storage for 7 days from the time of publication. There is no limit on the number of retained messages.
If subscribers don't use a subscription, the subscription expires. The default expiration period is 31 days.
Schema Schema size (the definition field): 50KB
Revisions per schema: 20
Publish request 10MB (total size)
1,000 messages
Message Message size (the data field): 10MB
Attributes per message: 100
Attribute key size: 256 bytes
Attribute value size: 1024 bytes
StreamingPull streams 10 MB/s per open stream
Unary Pull response Maximum number of messages in Pull response: 1000
Maximum size of Pull response: 10 MB
Pull/StreamingPull messages The service might impose limits on the total number of outstanding StreamingPull messages per connection. If you run into such limits, increase the rate at which you acknowledge messages and the number of connections you use.
Acknowledge and ModifyAckDeadline requests 512 KB (total size)
Ordering keys If messages have ordering keys, the maximum publisher throughput is 1 MBps for each ordering key.

Use a service account for higher quotas

If you use the Google Cloud CLI gcloud tool with a normal user account (that is, a non-service account), Pub/Sub operations are limited to a rate suitable for manual operations. Rates in excess of this limit results in the RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED error. The solution is to make sure that you are using service account credentials. If you wish to use credentials from the gcloud CLI for automation, activate a service account for your Pub/Sub operations.

Use locational endpoints to route requests

If you have additional quota in particular regions, you can route requests to these regions using locational Pub/Sub endpoints. When you publish messages to a global endpoint, the Pub/Sub service might route traffic to a region that does not have sufficient quota.

Quota mismatches

Quota mismatches can happen when published or received messages are smaller than 1000 bytes. For example:

  • If you publish 10 500-byte messages in separate requests, your publisher quota usage will be 10,000 bytes. This is because messages that are smaller than 1000 bytes are automatically rounded up to the next 1000-byte increment.

  • If you receive those 10 messages in a single pull response, your subscriber quota usage might be only 5 kB, since the actual size of each message is combined to determine the overall quota.

  • The inverse is also true. The subscriber quota usage might be greater than the publisher quota usage if you publish multiple messages in a single publish request or receive the messages in separate Pull requests.