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API Rate Limiting and Throttling in High-Traffic Systems with Node.js
In today’s world of high-performance applications and APIs, managing traffic flow is crucial to prevent abuse, maintain system health, and ensure a seamless user experience. Two popular techniques for handling traffic control are API Rate Limiting and Throttling. In this article, we’ll break down these concepts in detail and explain how you can implement them in Node.js applications to handle high-traffic systems effectively.
Let’s start with a little story.
Imagine your API is a coffee shop…
You own a small coffee shop that offers free coffee refills. Everything runs smoothly until one day, a large group of people walks in and begins to drain your resources, leaving no coffee for your regular customers. What do you do? You either start limiting how many refills each customer can get within a certain time (Rate Limiting), or you slow down how fast you refill their cups, ensuring everyone gets coffee at a reasonable pace (Throttling).
In the same way, APIs must handle a surge in requests to avoid getting overwhelmed. Without a good system in place, your API could experience slow performance, increased downtime, or even security vulnerabilities. Let’s dive deeper into these two important concepts.
