Rate Limiting

Kind: mechanism

Layer: Performance Core

Record: architecture:rate-limiting

Severity: contextual

Scope: API, service, queue

Canonical: Ontology

A mechanism that caps how many requests a caller can make in a time window and rejects the excess.

Listed in Architecture principles, after Resource Utilization and before Memory Efficiency.

Requires

• Quota Policy

Reinforces

• Backpressure
• Security

Enables

• Abuse/Overload Protection

Conflicts with

• Unbounded Access

In tension with

• User Experience

Tensions

• Rate Limiting / User Experience

Violated by

• Unbounded Access

Severity

• contextual

Category

• Scalability / Performance / Optimization

Refactors

• Missing Backpressure
• Agentic Architecture

Linked from

• Anti-patterns
• Error Handling / Resilience
• Model Architecture
• Quality Attributes
• Scalability / Performance / Optimization
• Severity levels
• The resolutions