An Alternative Approach to Rate Limiting

An interesting article on the pros and cons of various rate limiting methods and an alternative approach which you may not have considered.

Our rate limiting system is homegrown, and I’d like to explain its design in case it’s useful to others. It combines a few standard techniques to control the rate at which people issue requests to your server, and it’s relatively accurate, simple, and space-efficient. If you’re a company building web applications at consumer scale, our rate limiter can prevent users from harming your website’s availability with a spate of requests. It also happens to be great at stopping spam attacks, as we discovered. Source: An alternative approach to rate limiting – Figma Design