How many dbt threads should I configure

Athena has certain service API call quotas. The StartQueryExecution API supports 20 calls per second, and – if no api call is made in 4s – a burst to 80 calls. See the AWS Athena service limits documentation.

Due to these limits, you should consider how many concurrent API requests are happening in your AWS account and configure your threads accordingly. A good average value for threads could be threads: 8.