How to Measure and Improve AI API Throughput: Trade-offs Between Concurrency, RPM/TPM Rate Limits, and Latency

Learn how to measure AI API throughput using output tokens per second and completed requests per second, find the optimal concurrency via step-load testing, estimate capacity against RPM and TPM limits, and implement connection reuse, prompt caching, token usage control, and 429 retry with jitter to balance throughput and time-to-first-token.

How to Set AI API Concurrency Limits? Four Criteria Plus Load Testing

Determining AI API concurrency limits requires balancing four constraints: account quotas, inference throughput collapse, output length, and p95 latency, all validated through load testing.