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Designing an API Rate Limiter
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1. What is a Rate Limiter?

Imagine we have a service which is receiving a huge number of requests, but it can only serve a limited number of requests per second. To handle this problem we would need some kind of throttling or rate limiting mechanism that would allow only a certain number of requests so our service can respond to all of them. A rate limiter, at a high-level, limits the number of events an entity (user, device, IP, etc.) can perform in a particular time window. For example:

  • A user can send only one message per second.

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