Managing API Request Rate with Throttling in Go
Introduction
In a world where microservices and distributed systems have become common, there’s a high chance you’ll need to interact with several APIs in your applications. However, APIs typically have rate-limiting policies, restricting the number of requests a client can make within a specific timeframe. Violating these limits can lead to your application’s requests being throttled or blocked, disrupting its functionality. Therefore, we must incorporate throttling or debouncing strategies within our application. In this post, we’ll walk you through implementing and testing a throttling strategy for API requests in Go.
Throttling: What is it?
Throttling regulates the rate at which application processing is conducted (think of API calls). Throttling acts like an adjustable valve that regulates the rate of data flow.
Throttling Implementation in Go
We’ll use the power of goroutines and buffered channels to implement throttling in Go. Buffered channels provide a simple yet effective way of limiting the number of simultaneous goroutines. Each goroutine will represent a separate request in the context of API requests.
