Rate Limits Overview

A rate limit is a strategy for limiting the usage of a shared resource across parallel components in a Tyk Streams instance, or potentially across multiple instances. They are configured as a resource:

rate_limit_resources:
  - label: foobar
    local:
      count: 500
      interval: 1s

And most components that hit external services have a field rate_limit for specifying a rate limit resource to use. For example, if we wanted to use our foobar rate limit with a HTTP request:

input:
  http_client:
    url: TODO
    verb: GET
    rate_limit: foobar

By using a rate limit in this way we can guarantee that our input will only poll our HTTP source at the rate of 500 requests per second.