Concepts / Sending and managing data / Data, query size, and usage limits
May. 10, 2019

Data, Query Size, and Usage Limits

Size Limits

Record Size

Algolia limits the size of a record for performance reasons. The limits depend on your plan - see our pricing page. We recommend a few techniques that can help you reformat and break up your records into smaller ones.

Records can’t go beyond a certain size limit of minified JSON:

  • 10 KB for Pro, Starter, or Free accounts
  • 20 KB for legacy (Essential and Plus)
  • 100 KB or more for Enterprise plans.

You’ll get the Record is too big error if you try to index a record that exceeds the limit.

Index Size

Strictly speaking, there’s no upper limit to an index’s size. It can be many gigabytes. However, the larger the index, the more likely sending data will timeout. Additionally, even though your allocated space is quite big, it’s not unlimited. If you reach 80% of your allocated space, you’ll experience slowdowns in your search because of how Algolia stores your data. If you go over 100%, you’ll need to reduce your data or change your plan.

What you need to keep in mind is that there’s no limit to the number of records an index can have. There’s only a limit to the size on the disk.

Indexing Usage Limits

Max indexing operations

Regarding pricing, we count the number of operations performed every month. If you hit the limit of your plan, we’ll charge you a fee for the extra operations you’ve performed, based on the over-quota pricing of your current plan.

Indexing rate limit

Algolia delays or rejects indexing operations whenever a server is overloaded. If Algolia determines that indexing operations will negatively impact search requests, it takes action to favor search over indexing. We call this the rate limit, put in place to protect the server’s search capacity.

Query Usage

A search operation is counted whenever a search is performed. In autocomplete and search-as-you-type implementations, a new search is performed on every keystroke. In case your search engine is querying N indices at each keystroke (a product index, a brand index, a categories index, etc.) then one keystroke will correspond to N operations.

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