bkcsoft

Scaling your API with rate limiters

The following are examples of the four types rate limiters discussed in the accompanying blog post. In the examples below I've used pseudocode-like Ruby, so if you're unfamiliar with Ruby you should be able to easily translate this approach to other languages. Complete examples in Ruby are also provided later in this gist.

In most cases you'll want all these examples to be classes, but I've used simple functions here to keep the code samples brief.

Request rate limiter

This uses a basic token bucket algorithm and relies on the fact that Redis scripts execute atomically. No other operations can run between fetching the count and writing the new count.

bkcsoft

slow

This bash script offers quick shortcuts to simulate slower network connections. It is useful when you need to simulate a wireless network on a Linux network server, especially when you are using a virtual machine guest on your local machine or in the cloud.

slow 3G                   # Slow network on default eth0 down to 3G wireless speeds
slow reset                # Reset connection for default eth0 to normal
slow vsat --latency=500ms # Simulate satellite internet  with a high latency
slow dsl -b 1mbps         # Simulate DSL with a slower speed than the default

slow modem-56k -d eth0 # Simulate a 56k modem on the eth1 device. eth0 is unchanged.