What are quotas?
The B2C Commerce Platform was designed to be used as an ecommerce system. With that usage scenario in mind, certain constraints and limits were set during design and implementation to ensure the efficiency and stability of solutions built on top of the platform. These limits concern memory usage, resource consumption, API calls, and the number of business objects.
Quotas are part of the B2C Commerce Platform. They are used to monitor platform resource usage in custom code. Platform resources include memory, application server threads, database table sizes, and so on. Typically, when a quota is exceeded, custom code is using platform capabilities inefficiently, and a more efficient solution is possible.
What happens when a quota is exceeded?
A quota is either "enforced" or "not enforced." If an enforced quota is exceeded, an exception is thrown, which prevents the current operation from completing. The exception cannot and should not be caught within the customization. The design criteria must be avoidance of quota violations. Examples for quota violations are:
- a Collection with too many elements was created in memory, or
- too many persistent objects of a certain type were created in an instance.
If an enforced quota is exceeded in a storefront request, the general error page appears. If an enforced quota is exceeded during a standard import, a Data Warning or Data Error is reported. If a quota is not enforced, the platform does not take an action when the limit is exceeded.
B2C Commerce plans to enforce all quotas in the future.
How "safe" is my implementation?
Information on API and object usage levels, number of violations on a particular instance, and which quotas are enforced, can all be found in Business Manager (Administration > Operations > Quota Status). Business Manager shows quota usage/violations since server restart or within the last 24 hours.
Some quotas also specify a warning threshold, to give you an early indication that a quota limit may soon be exceeded.
When the warning threshold is exceeded and when the quota limit is exceeded, messages are written to the quota log files. This happens for all quotas, enforced and unenforced. The log files are written to the log files folder and have the prefix "quota". Keep in mind that quota log files are written with a time delay. The log files contain information about where the quota violation occurred. Also, they may contain information about quotas that do not appear in Business Manager. These are experimental quotas, still under review by B2C Commerce, and not enforced; you can safely ignore them.
Quota reference
Quotas can be grouped into API and Object quotas. The following pages contain detailed information about the individual quotas: