Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by clukic 1834 days ago
Right. I think when you're dealing with massive traffic and you want to create a highly scalable API this is one technique. But then if everything is hitting a queue why have an application level rate limit? Adding items to the queue costs essentially 0, and you get to it when you get to it. If you think an app is abusing your API, then change the rate you process the queue for that app, or you know reach out to the app developer and ask them to stop.
1 comments

The queue has to be stored somewhere and that takes either memory and disk or memory. That's not finite and prone to spikes (e.g. from another service suddenly waking up and calling you)
That's true. And really, of all the things the app level rate limit is perhaps the least worth mentioning. Not wanting to get into the weeds, what I didn't say is that there's no way of returning the extent of the data for a given user. So, the recommended approach by the support team is to always request all data. This easily maxes out the rate limit. Feedback that this lack of transparency is problem for both consumer and provider alike, fell on deaf ears.