2026-01-15

Building a Token Bucket Rate Limiter from Scratch

How I designed and implemented a distributed token bucket rate limiter in Go — the tradeoffs, the edge cases, and what I'd do differently.

GoDistributed SystemsRate Limiting

This is a sample blog post. Replace this content with your own writing.

The Problem

Rate limiting is one of those problems that looks simple until you have to make it work in a distributed system.

The token bucket algorithm allows bursting while enforcing a steady-state rate...

type TokenBucket struct {
    capacity  int64
    tokens    int64
    refillRate float64
    lastRefill time.Time
    mu         sync.Mutex
}