Throttling method calls to M requests in N seconds

Question

I'd use a ring buffer of timestamps with a fixed size of M. Each time the method is called, you check the oldest entry, and if it's less than N seconds in the past, you execute and add another entry, otherwise you sleep for the time difference.

What worked out of the box for me was Google Guava RateLimiter.

// Allow one request per second
private RateLimiter throttle = RateLimiter.create(1.0);

private void someMethod() {
    throttle.acquire();
    // Do something
}

In concrete terms, you should be able to implement this with a DelayQueue. Initialize the queue with M Delayed instances with their delay initially set to zero. As requests to the method come in, take a token, which causes the method to block until the throttling requirement has been met. When a token has been taken, add a new token to the queue with a delay of N.

Read up on the Token bucket algorithm. Basically, you have a bucket with tokens in it. Every time you execute the method, you take a token. If there are no more tokens, you block until you get one. Meanwhile, there is some external actor that replenishes the tokens at a fixed interval.

I'm not aware of a library to do this (or anything similar). You could write this logic into your code or use AspectJ to add the behavior.

If you need a Java based sliding window rate limiter that will operate across a distributed system you might want to take a look at the https://github.com/mokies/ratelimitj project.

A Redis backed configuration, to limit requests by IP to 50 per minute would look like this:

import com.lambdaworks.redis.RedisClient;
import es.moki.ratelimitj.core.LimitRule;

RedisClient client = RedisClient.create("redis://localhost");
Set<LimitRule> rules = Collections.singleton(LimitRule.of(1, TimeUnit.MINUTES, 50)); // 50 request per minute, per key
RedisRateLimit requestRateLimiter = new RedisRateLimit(client, rules);

boolean overLimit = requestRateLimiter.overLimit("ip:127.0.0.2");

See https://github.com/mokies/ratelimitj/tree/master/ratelimitj-redis fore further details on Redis configuration.