Synchronous Ledger Entry Rate Limiting

The Ledgers API supports 100 QPS on all read and write APIs, and higher rate limits are available upon request. In addition to these standard rate limits, we also rate limit synchronous Ledger Entries at a rate of 20 Ledger Entries per Ledger Account per second and enforce a 5 QPS limit on Ledger transactions created with category balance locks.

A Ledger Entry is synchronous if any of the following conditions are true:

• One of these fields is set on the Ledger Entry at creation: pending_balance_amount, posted_balance_amount, available_balance_amount, or lock_version. See Handling Concurrency for information about these fields.
• The show_resulting_ledger_account_balances field is set to true on the Ledger Entry at creation.
• ledger_account_category_balance_locks specifies a Ledger Account Category that contains the Ledger Account of the Ledger Entry.

We rate limit synchronous Ledger Entries because they require a lock on the associated Ledger Account and must be processed serially. In order to avoid high latency and rate limiting at high throughputs, you must architect your ledger to avoid the “hot account” problem.

If you want to get the list of Ledger Entries that have been processed on a Ledger Account, fetch the Ledger Account and pass the returned lock_verson to List Ledger Entries in the as_of_lock_version parameter.