What happens if I hit a scalability target in Windows Azure Storage?

Question

This post says there's a limit of 5 thousand Blob Storage requests per storage account per second.

Transactions – Up to 5,000 entities/messages/blobs per second

What exactly happens if I hit this limit?

Answer 1

The request fails with an error: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2010/07/09/understanding-windows-azure-storage-billing-bandwidth-transactions-and-capacity.aspx (search 'Throttling' in the page).

Throttling – These are requests that are being throttled due to the transaction rate going over the per partition target throughput described in the post “Windows Azure Storage Abstractions and their Scalability Targets”. These throttled requests are counted as billable transactions. When this occurs, the client is expected to use exponential backoff and retry the request, which is provided by default with the storage client library. If it is a reoccurring event for the service, then the service should consider additional partitioning of its data structures as described in the upcoming posts on Blobs, Tables and Queues.

The error codes you might get back from the REST API are here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dd179382.aspx - I can't immediately see which one would apply in a throttling context.