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Rate Limits for Popular Counterparties

When you make outbound connections from your Files.com site to third-party remote servers, those connections will originate from the Files.com pool of shared IP addresses unless you’ve explicitly enabled dedicated IPs for your site.

Most of the time, this works well. However, when connecting to some popular third-party destinations that are used by many other Files.com customers, shared IP usage can lead to temporary connection throttling and rate limiting.

Why This Happens

Certain counterparties—such as Walmart, Goldman Sachs, and other large trading partners—are connected to by dozens, or even hundreds, of our customers at the same time.

Multiple customers connecting from the same source IP can trigger connection throttling and rate limiting at the destination. When multiple customers share the same source IP address while connecting to these high-traffic destinations, we automatically enforce connection pool limits to maintain fair usage and protect system stability.

In these cases, your connection may experience more aggressive parallelism limits, even if you have configured a higher number of maximum concurrent connections.

How to Identify This Scenario

If your connection attempt is throttled due to shared IP usage with a popular destination, you will see an error message referencing shared_limit or excessive_shared_limit in your site's outbound connection logs.

This error message indicates that your connection was temporarily limited due to high aggregate usage from our platform to that third-party system.

Normal connection rates are automatically restored when the remote server informs our platform that throttling is no longer being applied to our connections.

How to Avoid This

To avoid this type of limitation, we recommend enabling dedicated IP addresses for outbound connections to critical or high-volume partners. This ensures:

  • Your connection traffic is isolated from other customers
  • You maintain consistent throughput
  • You reduce the chance of external connection limits or platform-level throttling from remote servers

For help enabling dedicated IPs or optimizing your connection strategy, please contact Files.com Support. We’re happy to assist.

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