Gas limits and external message size

There are size restrictions for external messages (now it is about 16 kilobytes). So you will not be able to send more than 16 kb to a data contract in one message, and you will also not be able to deploy a contract with an external call larger than 16 kb.

Of course, there are workarounds. You can make a contract where you first fill in the data bit by bit, and then the contract will glue this data together and send it in one big internal message. But it is better to keep contract sizes relatively small.

These restrictions apply only to the size of external messages, not to the sizes of contracts and internal messages.

There is also a limit on the amount of gas that one transaction can spend, and it is quite small.

The absolute limit is about a million gas, but this will not tell you anything :-) You have to test it to see. For example, if you have a mapping with more than 1000 elements, you can write no more than 200 new keys in one transaction. Gas limits can be bypassed recursively by calling yourself (by sending an internal message to yourself).

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