Google Rate Limit Quota Exceeded but it doesn't appear to be even close

[Daisy_Ramirez]

Hi Everyone, we have an AppSheet account based on a Google Sheet and all images, pdfs and databases on the same Google Drive.  The app is a decent size and manages consistent traffic throughout the day by around 40 employees who create & update records, send emails and save files to the Google Drive account. 

On Friday we received the Rate Limit Quota Exceed error and the operation was pretty much shut down. We contacted technical support and outside of a few Thank you for your patience emails we've still not received a response.  In order to get them back up and running I moved the database to another Google Drive Account and then moved it back the following day after the Rate Limit Reset.

In hopes of understanding what happened I've read through quite a few reference on the Rate Limit Quotas but I'm still unclear what caused the error as the visible numbers don't appear to be even close to the quotas.

When I log into Google Console and view API's & Services I only see 1 project (Integromat) with Google Drive enabled. 

It shows the following in Metrics for the past 7 days (which would include this past Friday):

It shows the following in Quotas:

When I drill down on the Queries per 100 seconds, I see this (Peak Usage: 0.61%)

Questions:

1. Was the drive.files.get in Metrics above the cause of the error with 36626 Requests?
2. I don't see AppSheet referenced in Google Console. How can I tell if AppSheet simply displayed Google Drive's Rate LImit Exceeded message and/or if AppSheet was the cause of the error due to traffic?
3. I'm not convinced my client needs a Rate Limit Increase seeing as we're nowhere close to the number but if we wanted to increase the Rate Limits where can I do that in Google Console?
4. What else could have triggered the message?

Any help and/or references would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks so much!

[WillowMobileSys]

The first thing to understand is which Quota was exceeded - there are many.  This should be reflected in the error message.  Do you have the error message and all it details that you can post here for more assistance?

[Daisy_Ramirez]

Sorry about that. Here's one of the errors although we did see a few variations. Thanks so much!

[WillowMobileSys]

Based on the error message,  it looks like the error is occuring while trying to read a Google sheet for a table.  Because it is a Rate Limit, I am thinking you are hitting the Query Rate Limit.  Does the sheet have Query() statements in it OR Query() statements against it?

I assume because you are showing the Requests per 100 seconds above in this post that you DO have Query() formulas.

There is another Rate Limit of 10 requests per second per IP address.  I don't actually know what is defined as a "request" just that is has to do with querying the sheet data. It sounds like to me that your sheet is somehow triggering more than 10 "requests" during load of the AppSheet tables.  This fits with the error since the loading will be done by the same IP address.  

[Daisy_Ramirez]

Thanks so much. On your question: "Does the sheet have Query() statements in it OR Query() statements against it?"  The google sheet sits in the Google Drive directory and has no external queries outside of AppSheet hitting. Is the scenario you're thinking of possibly a slice or select statement within AppSheet that may generated more than 10 requests/second/IP?

[WillowMobileSys]

No, I was thinking of actual Query() formula usage based on personal experience in some of my first apps created in AppSheet.

Looking at the message again it does say "Google drive Rate Limiting exceptions".  I didn't really clue in on the "drive" portion of the message, I guess because it's in lower case.  But now that I realize it's there, it obviously must be referring to Google Drive access.  I also now realize that your chart query rates is actually Google Drive queries.

The question still remains, which Rate limit is being violated?  I wonder, do the Audit Logs for your app show more details?

[WillowMobileSys]

Also, I would suggest reaching out to support as this seems to be a problem in the ability to read table data from the sheet.  Any quota violations for that are between AppSheet and Google API, I would think.