2024-01-02
4560
#node
Philip Obosi
14373
Jan 2, 2024 β‹… 16 min read

Understanding and implementing rate limiting in Node.js

Philip Obosi Frontend engineer and data visualist πŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸ’» based in Lagos, Nigeria.

Recent posts:

master state management hydration Nuxt usestate

Nuxt state management and hydration with useState

useState can effectively replace ref in many scenarios and prevent Nuxt hydration mismatches that can lead to unexpected behavior and errors.

Yan Sun
Jan 20, 2025 β‹… 8 min read
React Native List Components: FlashList, FlatList, And More

React Native list components: FlashList, FlatList, and more

Explore the evolution of list components in React Native, from `ScrollView`, `FlatList`, `SectionList`, to the recent `FlashList`.

Chimezie Innocent
Jan 16, 2025 β‹… 4 min read
Building An AI Agent For Your Frontend Project

Building an AI agent for your frontend project

Explore the benefits of building your own AI agent from scratch using Langbase, BaseUI, and Open AI, in a demo Next.js project.

Ivaylo Gerchev
Jan 15, 2025 β‹… 12 min read
building UI sixty seconds shadcn framer ai

Building a UI in 60 seconds with Shadcn and Framer AI

Demand for faster UI development is skyrocketing. Explore how to use Shadcn and Framer AI to quickly create UI components.

Peter Aideloje
Jan 14, 2025 β‹… 6 min read
View all posts

10 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.

Leave a Reply