Governor limits

Apex code is approaching a governor limit warning email

Salesforce sent your team an email saying Apex is approaching a governor limit (typically 80% of CPU, SOQL, DML, or callout caps) but didn't fail. This is an early warning — investigate before it becomes a hard limit failure.

Also seen asgovernor limit warning email·Apex governor warning·approaching governor limit·Apex limit notification email

The platform sends "Apex Governor Limit Warning" emails when a transaction uses ≥80% of a governor cap without exceeding it. The email goes to:

The org's defined Apex Exception Email recipients (Setup → Apex Exception Email)
The user who triggered the transaction, if they have the relevant notification preference on

The transaction itself succeeded — but you're one user-action away from a hard failure.

Reading the email

Apex resource limit warning
Class: AccountTriggerHandler
Method: bulkProcess
SOQL queries: 81 of 100 (81%)
CPU time: 8200 ms of 10000 ms (82%)

Each line is one cap. The percentages tell you which is closest to the edge.

Fix the worst one first

Look at which cap is closest to 100%. That's the one that'll blow first. Common patterns:

Closest cap	Likely cause	Fix
SOQL queries	Loop with query inside	Lift query out, see SOQL 101
CPU time	Nested loops / heavy computation	Bulkify, cache describes, see CPU limit
DML statements	Loop with DML inside	Collect + DML once, see DML 151
Heap	Big query results held in memory	Stream with SOQL for-loop, see heap
Query rows	Unbounded SELECT	Add LIMIT or filter, see query rows

Don't ignore the email

These warnings precede outages. A trigger at 82% on a normal day will hit 110% the day someone bulk-imports 5x more data. Treat warnings as bug reports, not noise.

Set up dedicated alerting

The default email goes to one address. For team visibility, route to:

A Slack channel via a webhook or the Apex Exception Email integration
PagerDuty for after-hours
A Salesforce Custom Object that you query to dashboard

Sample router:

@InvocableMethod
public static void notifySlack(List<Apex_Error_Log__c> logs) {
    for (Apex_Error_Log__c log : logs) {
        // POST to Slack webhook with the log details
    }
}

Suppress the warnings (last resort)

If a specific code path is genuinely high-load and the warning is noise:

Setup → Apex Exception Email → uncheck for that user. Or add a try/catch that logs to a custom table without the auto-email.

But: don't suppress until you've reviewed what is approaching the cap. The platform sends warnings for a reason.

A common cause: trigger fan-out

A trigger that does N queries × M records per record runs at near-cap with normal data and crashes with bulk loads. Always test triggers with 200 records at minimum (the bulk trigger size) to catch this in testing instead of production.