Rate limiting in Golang HTTP client

Sun, 01 Dec 2019 21:57:40 +0800

I’ve been doing some interesting work with the team at MFlow writing HTTP clients that consume financial data, and it’s been eye-opening to see how different API platforms choose to protect their resources. Best practices for client-side rate limiting seem to be scarce when compared to server-side, so here are my thoughts on the subject and some code samples.

TL;DR — wrap *http.Client and call limiter.Wait(ctx) before every request, where limiter is a *rate.Limiter from golang.org/x/time/rate . The token bucket honours bursts, blocks cleanly when you’re out of tokens, and respects context cancellation.

API on Melchi

Rate limiting in Golang HTTP client