What is the advantage of using a library like Guava RateLimiter over simple Thread.sleep?

Question

Assuming all I want to do is call a service at a particular rate, say 1 per second, what advantages does Guava RateLimiter offer over simple Thread.sleep(1000) ?

Answer 1

The point of RateLimiter is you make it part of the service (or wrap the service) being called, so it can protect itself from being called too frequently. Your Thread#sleep alternative would have to be used by the client of the service, so you're comparing two different things.

Here's a good article on what you can do with RateLimiter.