What are rate limits? Time-window quotas differ from account balances
Explain request and token limits, distinguish concurrency and spending caps and use service responses for retries.
Understand the concept
Rate limits constrain requests or processing over time, often by requests or tokens. They differ from balance and maximum concurrency. Inspect errors and retry guidance and reduce or delay load rather than treating rejection as model failure or retrying continuously.
Several quota dimensions can apply together
OpenAI and Anthropic describe limits varying by account, model or usage tier. Long requests can exhaust token budgets with few calls, while short calls can hit request limits. Public examples do not establish account quotas. Spending and load limits differ. Distinguish authentication, parameters and throttling for appropriate recovery.
Check throttling handling with bounded public requests
For public batch text, first simulate throttling and then check service behavior within authorized bounds. Preserve identifiers and waiting states and prevent duplicate results. Follow retry guidance rather than accelerating retries. No load test, quota read or paid call occurred here. Query possible write completion before repeating business actions after ambiguous errors.
Scheduling must include waiting and recovery
More concurrency cannot exceed total quotas and may create more failures. Queue unfinished items and resume without accepting empty results. Recheck limits after account or model changes rather than hardcoding old numbers. Separate queueing and processing and count retries. Distinguish waiting from failure; throttling says nothing about answer quality.
Checked sources
These sources support the concepts and methods described here. Examples and test scope are labeled separately; check the version of the tools you use.