At times when there is lot of traffic on our system either resources exhausts or need to increase servers to fulfil requests. At this point Rate Limiter is the saviour, let’s talk about this in depth over here.
What is a Rate Limiter?
A rate limiter controls the amount of traffic sent by a client or service in a network system. It limits the number of client requests allowed to be sent over a specified period. If the number of API requests exceeds the rate limiter’s threshold, all extra calls are denied.
Above we saw a use-case and a benefit of rate limiter, there are many other benefits as well:-
- Prevent resource starvation caused by Denial of Service (DoS) attack.
- Excess requests are limited, which means fewer servers are needed and more resources are allocated to high-priority APIs.
- Ensure that servers are not overburdened. A rate limiter is used to reduce server load by filtering out excessive requests caused by bots or user misbehaviour.