Rate Limiting — Token Bucket & Leaky Bucket
Fixed and sliding windows argue about counting; token and leaky buckets argue about bursts. Here’s the contract each one enforces — and why production systems layer both.
6 min read
4 articles with this tag.
Fixed and sliding windows argue about counting; token and leaky buckets argue about bursts. Here’s the contract each one enforces — and why production systems layer both.
6 min read
Fixed window rate limiting looks simple and behaves well on dashboards — until traffic piles up at window boundaries. Here’s why the contract is met while the system still overloads.
3 min read
Sliding windows answer the right question — how many requests in the last N seconds — but log-based precision doesn’t scale, and bucketed counters still miss microbursts.
4 min read
What rate limiting really is, why systems need it, and how to think about capacity enforcement. A practical guide from a 4 AM post-launch incident to the mental models that prevent them.
6 min read