Lifting the limit on calls to the Google Chart API
By Sebastian
Wilhelmi, Google Chart API SREWe got a lot of feedback
after releasing the
Google Chart
API in early December. By far the most questions were about the limit of 50,000
queries per user per day. Some of you who are webmasters of larger sites are afraid of
overstepping this limit. We've heard your concerns, and have decided to drop that limit
altogether.
However, should you expect to regularly cause more than
250,000 queries per day to the Google Chart API, we'd like you to let us know by mailing
chart-api-notifications@google.com so that we can plan for the demand.
And with that said, from now on, if your site can't handle the
Slashdot effect, it shouldn't
be because of the Google Chart API. ;)
But why did we impose a query
limit to start with? It was there to ensure that we could provide a reliable service for all
legitimate users because we were able to lock out malicious users.
We
work hard to provide reliable services, and even have a specific team of site reliability
engineers (SRE) dedicated to keeping our services up and running (as well as fast). I cover
the Chart API for SRE. A very important part of an SRE's work is capacity planning, because
only a service with sufficient capacity can serve reliably and with low latency. For a new
service, planning the capacity is naturally very hard, because there are a lot of unknown
contributing variables. That's why we started with a quite conservative query limit. Now, that
we've had the public API running for some time, we've collected enough experience to feel
comfortable raising that limit without jeopardizing the service's reliability.
By the way, there's a lot more to what an SRE does. We also run, debug,
optimize and troubleshoot very large scale distributed systems. If you're interested, come
join Google SRE -- for instance the
Zürich SRE team, where I work.
