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The Internet Compass

Engineering

Rate Limiting

Rate limiting restricts the number of requests a client can make to a service within a defined time window, typically enforced with token-bucket or sliding-window algorithms and communicated through HTTP 429 responses.

Well-designed rate limiting returns remaining quota and reset time in response headers so clients can back off intelligently rather than guessing.

Limits are usually applied per API key, per user and per endpoint simultaneously, since a single global limit fails to protect expensive operations.