rate limiting

term

networkingweb devsecurity

Capping how often something may happen, to protect a system from load it cannot absorb.

Used as containment it buys time without fixing anything, and it moves the problem rather than removing it: whatever was rate limited is still trying, and the queue it forms is now somebody's capacity problem. The retry that masks a slow dependency becomes a thundering herd when the dependency stops entirely.

Also known as: rate limit, throttling

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