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Software Engineering vocabulary · APIs, Networking and Security

Rate limit

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCommon term

In software engineering, rate limit means: A cap on how many requests a client may send to an API in a given time, for example 100 requests per minute, to protect the service from overload or abuse.

In Turkish: istek sınırı, hız sınırı, istek limiti

How it is used

When you hit or exceed the rate limit, the API usually returns status 429 Too Many Requests. Clients handle it by waiting and retrying with increasing delays (backoff). As a verb: 'We got rate-limited.'

Example sentences

  1. The import job hit the rate limit after 1,000 requests and stopped.

  2. We added a rate limit to the login endpoint to slow down password-guessing attacks.

Common collocations

  • hit the rate limit
  • exceed the rate limit
  • get rate-limited
  • 429 Too Many Requests
  • APIShort for application programming interface: a set of rules that lets one program ask another program for data or actions in a fixed, documented way.
  • API keyA unique secret code that a program sends with its requests so that the API can identify who is calling and decide what they are allowed to do.
  • status codeA three-digit number in an HTTP response that tells the client what happened, such as 200 for success, 404 for not found or 500 for a server error.
  • endpointA specific URL of an API that accepts requests for one kind of action, such as GET /users to list users or POST /orders to create an order.

More terms: APIs, Networking and Security

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