Rate Limiting Glossary
Explore 17 platform engineering definitions related to Rate Limiting.
Fixed window rate limiting
Counts requests in discrete, non-overlapping time buckets.
Sliding window rate limiting
Maintains rolling count of requests over recent N seconds.
Token bucket
Accumulates tokens at fixed rate; requests consume tokens.
Leaky bucket
Processes requests at constant output rate, queueing excess.
Burst limit
Maximum requests above steady-state rate in short period.
Rate limit window
Time period over which request counts are measured.
Global vs per-consumer rate limit
Global limit shared across all clients vs per-consumer independent counters.
Jitter (retries)
Adds randomness to retry wait times to prevent synchronized retries.
Exponential backoff
Retry wait times grow multiplicatively after each failure.
Retry storm
Failure amplification where synchronized retries recreate overload.
HTTP 429 Too Many Requests
Standard status code for rate limiting responses.
RateLimit headers (IETF)
Standardized headers for communicating quota information.
X-RateLimit headers
Legacy de facto standard for rate limit state communication.
Retry-After header
Specifies how long client should wait before retrying.
API throttling vs rate limiting
Rate limiting rejects excess; throttling delays to preserve availability.
nginx limit_req
Nginx directive implementing leaky bucket rate limiting (token-bucket-like with nodelay).
Kong rate-limiting plugin
Enforces request quotas on routes and services.