---
title: Giving everybody their time with the toad
teaser: With rate limiting in place, performance should stabilize for projects.
tags: news,airbrake
author: Joe Ferris
published_on: 2009-11-18
---

[Our little toad](http://hoptoadapp.com) has grown up to be quite the bullfrog.
[Atticus](http://twitter.com/hoptoadapp) always hops at the opportunity to catch
a new error, but from time to time we've experienced floods of incoming errors
from a single project, often thousands per minute. We've occasionally had to
disable such projects, but we've never had a policy regarding the number of
errors each user could submit. However, we've now reached a point where we've
realized that allowing a single project to use up so many resources is
unrealistic given our goal of providing reliable service to all of our
customers.

Therefore, we're rolling out rate limits for all Hoptoad projects. Each [Hoptoad
plan](http://hoptoadapp.com/account/new) now has a maximum number of errors
allowed per minute for each project. After reaching that threshold, incoming
errors for that project will be discarded for the rest of that minute. Errors
will be accepted again as soon as that minute is over, and the performance of
your application should not be affected. If your account is affected by this
change, you'll know - you'll be notified by e-mail whenever a project goes over
the rate limit for your plan (but only once per day for each project).

This means that we no longer plan on totally disabling projects as we have in
the past. It also means that a flood of errors from a single project won't cause
problems for anyone else, and most projects are well below the limit, so few
users will experience throttling.

These changes will preserve or improve the level of service for all plans, and
put a more effective and fair solution in place for projects with large error
traffic spikes.

FYI: _Hoptoad/Airbrake was sold to RackSpace and is now called [Airbrake Bug Tracker](http://airbrake.io)_.