Machine Translation throttles API access to ensure service stability and the fair use of resources. This topic describes the API throttling rules and usage limits, and provides recommendations for managing API throttling.
To increase your queries per second (QPS) limit, contact pre-sales support or join our DingTalk group (ID: 23369411).
Throttling scope
Throttling is enabled for all Machine Translation APIs. Different APIs have different throttling thresholds.
API usage limits
All Machine Translation APIs have usage limits. Different types of limits are set for different APIs.
What is the API rate limit for a single user?
The API rate limit for a single user is the maximum number of times an API can be called per second or per minute. This limit applies to the combined calls from a single Alibaba Cloud account and all of its Resource Access Management (RAM) users.
For example, the API rate limit for the TranslateGeneral operation is 50 calls per second. If an Alibaba Cloud account and its five RAM users all call this API, their combined call frequency cannot exceed 50 calls per second.
Machine Translation product limits
For more information about API rate limits, see Quota Center. For more information about API pricing, see Billing overview.
Product category | API | API title | Quota | Usage limit | Usage notes |
Text translation | General-purpose text translation | 50 QPS | <5,000 characters per request | Punctuation marks, spaces, and HTML tags are counted as characters. A Chinese character, an English letter, or a punctuation mark is counted as one character for billing. | |
Professional text translation | 50 QPS | <5,000 characters per request | |||
Batch text translation | 50 QPS | <1,000 characters per request | |||
Language detection | 50 QPS | <5,000 characters per request | |||
Multimodal translation | Image translation | 5 QPS | File size: <10 MB | You are not charged for failed image translations. | |
Certificate translation | 5 QPS | File size: <10 MB | |||
Create document translation task | 5 QPS | File size: <50 MB | |||
Get document translation result | 5 QPS | ||||
Cross-border e-commerce multilingual tools | Smart product image translation | 3 QPS | File size: 10 MB. Pixel limits: The shortest edge of the image must be at least 15 pixels, and the longest edge must not exceed 8,192 pixels. | ||
Create asynchronous batch image translation task | 3 QPS | ||||
Get asynchronous batch image translation result | 3 QPS | ||||
Image language diagnosis | 3 QPS | ||||
Title diagnosis | 10 QPS | ||||
Title optimization | 10 QPS | ||||
Smart title generation | 10 QPS |
Throttling rules
The API access throttling rules are as follows:
Throttling for each API is calculated independently. If you reach the throttling threshold for one API, it does not affect your calls to other APIs or your use of the same API in other regions.
If an API is throttled in minute T, you can resume calling it in minute T+1.
If an API call made using an SDK or the command-line interface (CLI) is throttled and returns an error, the corresponding operation in the Alibaba Cloud console is also throttled.
Recommendations
If a request to a Machine Translation API reaches the throttling threshold, the system returns a `Throttling` error code and does not process the request. Consider the following recommendations when you call APIs:
Bulk Operations
Manage your QPS.
Implement a backoff strategy. If an API call is throttled, use a backoff strategy for subsequent requests. During the backoff period, you can probe for availability at a rate of 1 QPS.