2024-01-02
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#node
Philip Obosi
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Jan 2, 2024 ⋅ 16 min read

Understanding and implementing rate limiting in Node.js

Philip Obosi Frontend engineer and data visualist 👨🏻‍💻 based in Lagos, Nigeria.

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11 Replies to "Understanding and implementing rate limiting in Node.js"

  1. 2 of 3 cons of fixed window counter are not fair:
    – “user’s window should start counting from the time of their first request” -> this is easy to implement.
    – “burst traffic towards the end of a window” -> it may be issue, if your service is for one customer. It is unlikely, that all your thousands users would make all requests at once.

  2. Hi,
    It looks like using app.use() would limit the rate to the whole API. How would you go about applying rate limit to only a particular POST request while letting users do unlimited GET requests?

  3. Michal,

    You can do this by applying the middleware to the POST route directly instead of `app.use`

    e.g.

    `app.post(‘/limitedRoute’, customRedisRateLimiter, (req, res, next) => {})`

  4. When the record is null in the Redis store, you create the record, store it and then go to the next middleware. Shouldn’t there be a return statement after the next() instruction to prevent the middleware from executing the rest of the code ?

  5. you should wrap “await redisClient.connect()” in if statement with condition “!redisClient.isReady” or “!redisClient.isOpen” so it doesn’t throw “Socket already opened” error.

  6. this line get time of 24 hours ago from now ‘const windowStartTimestamp = moment().subtract(WINDOW_SIZE_IN_HOURS, ‘hours’).unix();’ and the record in redis already deleted after 24 hours , so how it comes?

  7. I tested the first implementation. I noticed that requestCount is only incremented when you call a different endpoint. But I want the rate to be per request, no matter the endpoints.

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