{"slug": "how-to-design-a-rate-limiter-token-bucket-sliding-window-more-system-design", "title": "How to Design a Rate Limiter — Token Bucket, Sliding Window & More (System Design Explained)", "summary": "A system design article explains how to design a rate limiter for APIs, covering algorithms like token bucket and sliding window, their trade-offs, and distributed implementation. The piece emphasizes rate limiting's role in preventing abuse and ensuring fair resource allocation.", "body_md": "Member-only story\n\n# How to Design a Rate Limiter — Token Bucket, Sliding Window & More (System Design Explained)\n\nEvery serious API has a rate limiter in front of it. Without one, a single misbehaving client — or a deliberate attacker — can consume all your capacity and take the service down for everyone.\n\nRate limiting sounds like a small utility feature. It’s actually a genuinely interesting design problem, it appears constantly in system design interviews, and the algorithm you choose has real consequences for how your API behaves under pressure.\n\nLet’s design one properly — covering all the major algorithms, their trade-offs, and how to run rate limiting across distributed servers.\n\n## What a Rate Limiter Does\n\nA rate limiter enforces rules like:\n\n- A user can make at most 100 API requests per minute\n- An IP address can attempt login at most 5 times per hour\n- A free-tier client can call the AI endpoint at most 10 times per day\n\nWhen the limit is exceeded, requests are rejected — typically with HTTP `429 Too Many Requests`\n\nand a header indicating when to retry:\n\n```\nHTTP/1.1 429 Too Many RequestsRetry-After: 30X-RateLimit-Limit: 100X-RateLimit-Remaining: 0X-RateLimit-Reset: 1719475200\n```\n\n", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-to-design-a-rate-limiter-token-bucket-sliding-window-more-system-design", "canonical_source": "https://blog.stackademic.com/how-to-design-a-rate-limiter-token-bucket-sliding-window-more-system-design-explained-c5197d271a77?source=rss----d1baaa8417a4---4", "published_at": "2026-07-07 07:42:10+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-07 08:02:18.724056+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-to-design-a-rate-limiter-token-bucket-sliding-window-more-system-design", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-to-design-a-rate-limiter-token-bucket-sliding-window-more-system-design.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-to-design-a-rate-limiter-token-bucket-sliding-window-more-system-design.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-to-design-a-rate-limiter-token-bucket-sliding-window-more-system-design.jsonld"}}