Reduce throttling at the service level - Amazon Athena

Reduce throttling at the service level

To avoid Amazon S3 throttling at the service level, you can monitor your usage and adjust your service quotas, or you use certain techniques like partitioning. The following are some of the conditions that can lead to throttling:

  • Exceeding your account's API request limits – Amazon S3 has default API request limits that are based on account type and usage. If you exceed the maximum number of requests per second for a single prefix, your requests may be throttled to prevent overload of the Amazon S3 service.

  • Insufficient partitioning of data – If you do not properly partition your data and transfer a large amount of data, Amazon S3 can throttle your requests. For more information about partitioning, see the Use partitioning section in this document.

  • Large number of small objects – If possible, avoid having a large number of small files. Amazon S3 has a limit of 5500 GET requests per second per partitioned prefix, and your Athena queries share this same limit. If you scan millions of small objects in a single query, your query will likely be throttled by Amazon S3.

To avoid excess scanning, you can use AWS Glue ETL to periodically compact your files, or you partition the table and add partition key filters. For more information, see the following resources.