An Alternative Approach to Rate Limiting
I think rate limiting is the wrong idea. Say for example, a client wants to re-fetch everything that it has cached, it may send a burst of requests in a short amount of time, and some of those requests may be wrongly rejected due to rate limits. This is what happens when a browser refreshes a page for example.A better approach I think is delaying request handling based on resource allocation. If one client is disproportionately using up more time than others, then processing that clients' request will be queued up to process later, while well behaving clients will get their requests handled quickly. I think this is a more realistic approach and imposes less arbitrary restrictions.