One reason for The request uses too many resources error when create sub site in Sharepoint Online

Recently we faced with the following issue: when users with standard Manage hierarchy permission level (according to description of this permission level, user with these permissions “can create sites and edit pages, list items, and documents”) tried to create sub site in Sharepoint Online the following exception was thrown:

ServerException: Provisioning did not succeed. Details: Failed to initialize some site properties for Web at Url: 'http://example.com' OriginalException: The request uses too many resources.

StackTrace: at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientRequest.ProcessResponseStream(Stream responseStream) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientRequest.ProcessResponse() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientRequest.ExecuteQueryToServer(ChunkStringBuilder sb) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientRequest.ExecuteQuery() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientRuntimeContext.ExecuteQuery() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientContext.ExecuteQuery() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientContextExtensions.ExecuteQueryImplementation(ClientRuntimeContext clientContext, Int32 retryCount, Int32 delay)

We tried to increase server resource quota, but it didn’t help. The problem existed both for sites created from custom SP app and for standard site templates.

In order to avoid this error the following steps can be done: go to Site settings > Site permissions > Permission levels > Manage hierarchy and check the following permissions (by default they are unchecked for Manage hierarchy permission level):

• Apply Themes and Borders – Apply a theme or borders to the entire Web site
• Apply Style Sheets – Apply a style sheet (.CSS file) to the Web site

So they will look like this:

After that hierarchy managers should be able to create sub sites.