limiter

Provides a generic rate limiter for node.js. Useful for API clients, web crawling, or other tasks that need to be throttled. Two classes are exposed, RateLimiter and TokenBucket. TokenBucket provides a lower level interface to rate limiting with a configurable burst rate and drip rate. RateLimiter sits on top of the token bucket and adds a restriction on the maximum number of tokens that can be removed each interval to comply with common API restrictions like "150 requests per hour maximum".

Fork by @FGRibreau

• Don't wait for available tokens (don't use an internal queue with setTimeout)
• Don't use callbacks
• ParentBucket removed

Installation

Use NPM to install:

npm install limiter

Usage

A simple example allowing 150 requests per hour:

var RateLimiter = require('limiter').RateLimiter;
// Allow 150 requests per hour (the Twitter search limit). Also understands
// 'second', 'minute', 'day', or a number of milliseconds
var limiter = new RateLimiter(150, 'hour');

// Throttle requests
if(limiter.accept(1)){
  callMyRequestSendingFunction(...);
}

Another example allowing one message to be sent every 250ms:

var RateLimiter = require('limiter').RateLimiter;
var limiter = new RateLimiter(1, 250);

if(limiter.accept(1)){
  callMyMessageSendingFunction(...);
}

Uses the token bucket directly to throttle at the byte level:

var BURST_RATE = 1024 * 1024 * 150; // 150KB/sec burst rate
var FILL_RATE = 1024 * 1024 * 50; // 50KB/sec sustained rate
var TokenBucket = require('limiter').TokenBucket;
// We could also pass a parent token bucket in as the last parameter to
// create a hierarchical token bucket
var bucket = new TokenBucket(BURST_RATE, FILL_RATE, 'second');

if(bucket.accept(myData.byteLength)){
  sendMyData(myData);
});

Sponsors

• cull.tv - New music television

License

(The MIT License)

Copyright (c) 2011 Cull TV, Inc. <jhurliman@cull.tv>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.