asakura/rate_limiter

A high performance rate limiter on top of erlang atomics for Elixir

RateLimiter

RateLimiter is a high performance rate limiter implemented on top of erlang :atomics which uses only atomic hardware instructions without any software level locking. As a result RateLimiter is ~20x faster than ExRated and ~80x faster than Hammer.

Installation

The package can be installed by adding rate_limiter to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:rate_limiter, "~> 0.4.0"}
  ]
end

Usage

First you need to create a new RateLimiter by calling RateLimiter.new/2 For example to create a rate limiter with a limitaion of 5 hits per second:

rate_limiter = RateLimiter.new(1000, 5)

You can also give your rate limiter an id using RateLimiter.new/3

rate_limiter = RateLimiter.new("my_rate_limiter", 1000, 5)

Subsequent calls to RateLimiter.new/3 with the same id will return the already created rate limiter instead of creating a new one, so that you can easily use a single ratelimiter across different processes in your application.

By calling RateLimiter.hit/2 you can check whether you reached the limit or not. The second parameter is optional number of hits with a default value of 1:

case RateLimiter.hit(rate_limiter, 2) do
  :ok ->
    # limit not reached yet
    
  {:error, eta}
    # limit exceeded, you need to wait `eta` milliseconds until its unblocked again
end

In use cases where you don't have a state to store your RateLimiter struct you can pass an id instead, but keep in mind using id makes it around 50% slower because it does an ets lookup to get to the rate limiter:

RateLimiter.hit("my_rate_limiter")

You can also create and check the rate limiter in one go if it's not already created:

RateLimiter.hit("my_rate_limiter", 1000, 5)

You can also use RateLimiter in a blocking way using RateLimiter.wait with the same API as hit, expect that when the limit is reached, the process will be blocked until ratelimiter is free for the next hit, and it always returns :ok:

rate_limiter = RateLimiter.new(1000, 5)
RateLimiter.wait(rate_limiter)

# or
RateLimiter.new("my_rate_limiter", 1000, 5)
RateLimiter.wait("my_rate_limiter")

# or
RateLimiter.wait("my_rate_limiter", 1000, 5)

RateLimiter.wait is suitable for use cases where there is a lot of processes racing for a single ratelimited resource.

License

RateLimiter is released under MIT license.