can you set an exception for nginx's requests per second limit?

Question

We try to save nginx resources by limiting the number of requests per second:

http {
    limit_req_zone  $binary_remote_addr  zone=gulag:10m  rate=2r/s;

    server
    {
        location / {
         proxy_pass http://0.0.0.0:8181;
         limit_req   zone=gulag  burst=40;
        }
    }
}

However, most employees in our company are also heavy users of our own website. Since everyone in the company appear to come from the same ip address were getting 503 errors because nginx thinks all the traffic is coming from one user. Can we add our ip as an exception to the requests per second limit?

Answer 1

Yes, you can. Just a quote from the documentation:

The key is any non-empty value of the specified variable (empty values are not accounted).

So you can achieve your goal by using geo and map modules like this:

geo $limited_net {
    default      1;
    10.1.0.0/16  0;
}

map $limited_net $addr_to_limit {
    0  "";
    1  $binary_remote_addr;
}

limit_req_zone  $addr_to_limit  zone=gulag:10m  rate=2r/s;