What is Rate Limit?

A policy that caps requests, tokens, concurrent work, or another resource within a defined time or capacity window.

Why does Rate Limit matter?

It protects providers and your own system from overload, uncontrolled spend, and unfair resource use.

Enforce per-tenant token and concurrency limits, read provider retry metadata, and queue or reject excess work predictably.

A rate limit controls allowed usage. Backpressure propagates downstream capacity constraints through a system.

Lessons that name Rate Limit in a title or section

Stateless MCP Gateways and Registry Admission
A gateway should make every route explicit. The 2026-07-28 protocol gives it method, name, version, capability, identity, cache, and trace boundaries without a transport session.
Phase 13: Tools & Protocols
LLM Routing Layer — LiteLLM, OpenRouter, Portkey
Provider lock-in is expensive. Different tool-calling workloads suit different models. Routing gateways give one API surface, retries, failover, cost tracking, and guardrails.
Phase 13: Tools & Protocols

BackpressureA flow-control mechanism that slows or rejects upstream work when a downstream component cannot process it safely at the current rate.
Retry with BackoffRepeating a failed transient operation after progressively longer delays, usually with randomized jitter and a strict retry limit.
Circuit BreakerA reliability control that temporarily stops calls to a dependency after failures cross a threshold, then probes whether the dependency…
Admission ControlA pre-acceptance gate that decides whether a request may enter a bounded queue or service under the system's current capacity, priority,…
Continuous BatchingA serving scheduler that adds and removes generation requests at iteration boundaries instead of waiting for every request in a fixed…
Load SheddingDeliberately rejecting, dropping, or cancelling selected work at one or more overload boundaries when demand exceeds the capacity…
Model RouterA component that selects a model or provider for a request using requirements such as capability, latency, cost, context size, policy, and…
Retry BudgetA bound on retry traffic, usually expressed relative to original requests or over a time window, that prevents retries from consuming…