Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

View nixme's full-sized avatar

Gopal Patel nixme

  • Qualified.com
  • San Francisco
  • X @nixme
View GitHub Profile
(Chapters marked with * are already written. This gets reorganized constantly
and 10 or so written chapters that I'm on the fence about aren't listed.)
Programmer Epistemology
* Dispersed Cost vs. Reduced Cost
* Verificationist Fallacy
* Mistake Metastasis
The Overton Window
Epicycles All The Way Down
The Hyperspace Gates Were Just There

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.