7.4. Message size limits

Messages in Babelway

Messages are basic processing units in Babelway. The system deals with all of them in the same way regardless of their type or size. To ensure maximum service availability, fairness among users and reduce system ressources utilization, we limit each message's size to 100MB, except:

• Gateway EMAIL: 10MB

Messages that do not respect these limits will be rejected and put in error.

Calculating a message's size

Messages are different from files. They contain additional execution data, user defined metadata, and other additional content through extra processings like signatures, duplicates of the inbound message or other messages. All this data affects the message's final size, which can turn out to be a lot larger than the initial file size. To estimate your message size, add to the file's base size the size of every binary metadata you define (additional messages, other elements from zip file, element fetched from the web via web calls, etc). Every extra-processing saving the message data as a metadata (like the Message Definition IN "Save input file" extra processing) also increases the size, adding to the message the weight of the file. You shouldn't worry about message sizes unless your files often reach tens of MB.

Units used

There exists a lot of confusion about the value in bytes of 1MB. Two definitions exist, one in base 10 (1 MB = 1 000 000 bytes) and one in base 2 (1 MB = 1024 * 1024 bytes = 1 048 576 bytes). Babelway uses the first definition in all the limits.