FREE · TOPIC 051

Rate Limiting And Abuse Prevention Case Study

2572 words·Updated 2026-08-28·

#system-design#rate-limiting#abuse-prevention#case-study

Accompanying Lab

Sliding Window Rate Limiter

An in-memory limiter that stores recent request timestamps per key and computes allow, remaining, and retry-after decisions.

Primary References & Engineering Sources

·[[wiki/sliding-window-rate-limiter]]
·[[wiki/rate-limiter-placement-and-keys]]
·[[wiki/security-and-abuse-prevention]]
·[[wiki/backpressure]]
·[[wiki/load-shedding]]
·[[wiki/circuit-breakers-and-timeouts]]
·[[wiki/hot-partitions]]
·[[wiki/bucketed-time-window-aggregation]]
·https://docs.github.com/en/rest/using-the-rest-api/rate-limits-for-the-rest-api
·https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6585
·https://stripe.com/blog/rate-limiters