Token Bucket Rate Limiting in Go
Rate limiting protects a service from traffic spikes, accidental client loops, and workloads that consume more resources than the system can safely handle. A useful limiter should do more than enforce a fixed request count: it should allow small bursts while keeping the long-term request rate bounded.
The token bucket algorithm provides exactly that behavior. This guide implements a small, concurrency-safe token bucket using only Go’s standard library and then shows how to use it in an HTTP service.
