Lately we’ve been making use of the Google Pub/Sub service at work. During development I ran into continual problems with API rate limits doing a modest number of API requests.

After some investigation with the Google support people (we have Gold support) it turns out that if you use the default authentication provided by the ‘gcloud’ command in your local development environment, you get different rate limits than a service account does.

I lost a lot of time trying to optimize for these API rate limit errors. Hopefully this little note will stop someone else from having to go through the same pain.