Rate-limiting RESTful consumer

Question

I am consuming a rate-limited web service, which only allows me to make 5 calls per second. I am using my server to proxy these calls to a web client:

Mashery > My Web Server > Client's Browser

I have optimized the usage of this web service, but there are still occasional times when I go over the rate limit. What I would like to do instead is hold the client's request for one second (or longer if warranted) before making the web service call to Mashery.

There are some ways I can solve this by building a simple queue system with a database back-end, but I'd rather avoid that if something already exists. Does something already exist to rate-limit the consuming side of this?

Answer 1

To reliably throttle requests to only 5 per second, I would employ a queue/worker system. But before that I would just request a higher rate limit by contacting API support for that platform. Of course, I would also consider using caching if it's a read-only method and you're pulling down a lot of the same data and it's compliant with the API TOS.