self-limiters 0.3.0

Distributed async rate limiters, using Redis

Self limiters

A library for regulating traffic with respect to concurrency or time.

It implements a semaphore to be used when you need to limit the number of concurrent requests to an API (or other resources). For example if you can only send 5 concurrent requests.

It also implements the token bucket algorithm which can be used to limit the number of requests made in a given time interval. For example if you're restricted to 10 requests per second.

Both limiters are async, FIFO, and distributed using Redis. You should probably only use this if you need distributed queues.

This was written with rate-limiting in mind, but the semaphore and token bucket implementations can be used for anything.

Installation

pip install self-limiters

Usage

Both implementations are written as async context managers.

Semaphore

The Semaphore can be used like this:

from self_limiters import Semaphore


# 5 requests at the time
async with Semaphore(name="", capacity=5, max_sleep=60, redis_url=""):
      client.get(...)

We use blpop to wait for the semaphore to be freed up, under the hood, which is non-blocking.

If you specify a non-zero max_sleep, a MaxSleepExceededError will be raised if blpop waits for longer than that specified value.

Token bucket

The TokenBucket context manager is used the same way, like this:

from self_limiters import TokenBucket


# 1 requests per minute
async with TokenBucket(
        name="",
        capacity=1,
        refill_amount=1,
        refill_frequency=60,
        max_sleep=600,
        redis_url=""
):
    client.get(...)

The limiter first estimates when there will be capacity in the bucket - i.e., when it's this instances turn to go, then async sleeps until then.

If max_sleep is set and the estimated sleep time exceeds this, a MaxSleepExceededError is raised immediately.

As a decorator

The package doesn't ship any decorators, but if you would like to limit the rate at which a whole function is run, you can create your own, like this:

from self_limiters import Semaphore


# Define a decorator function
def limit(name, capacity):
  def middle(f):
    async def inner(*args, **kwargs):
      async with Semaphore(
              name=name,
              capacity=capacity,
              redis_url="redis://127.0.0.1:6389"
      ):
        return await f(*args, **kwargs)
    return inner
  return middle


# Then pass the relevant limiter arguments like this
@limit(name="foo", capacity=5)
def fetch_foo(id: UUID) -> Foo:

Implementation and performance breakdown

The library is written in Rust (for fun) and relies on Lua scripts and pipelining to improve the performance of each implementation.

Redis lets users upload and execute Lua scripts on the server directly, meaning we can write e.g., the entire token bucket logic in Lua. This present a couple of nice benefits:

• Since they are executed on the redis instance, we can make 1 request to redis where we would otherwise have to make 3 or 4. The time saved by reducing the number of requests is significant.

• Redis is single-threaded and guarantees atomic execution of scripts, meaning we don't have to worry about data races. In a prior iteration, when we had to make 4 requests to estimate the wake-up time for a token bucket instance, we had needed to use the redlock algorithm to ensure fairness. With Lua scripts, our implementations are FIFO out of the box.

So in summary they make our implementation faster, since we save several round-trips to the server and back and since we no longer need locks, and distributed locks are expensive. And they simultaneously make the code much, much simpler.

This is how each implementation has ended up looking:

The semaphore implementation

1. Run a lua script to create a list data structure in redis, as the foundation of the semaphore.

   This script is idempotent, and skipped if it has already been created.

2. Run BLPOP to non-blockingly wait until the semaphore has capacity, and pop from the list when it does.

3. Then run a pipelined command to release the semaphore by adding back the capacity.

So in total we make 3 calls to redis, where we would have made 6 without the scripts, which are all non-blocking.

The token bucket implementation

The token bucket implementation is even simpler. The steps are:

1. Run a lua script to estimate and return a wake-up time.
2. Sleep until the given timestamp.

We make 1 call instead of 3, then sleep. Both are non-blocking.

In other words, the very large majority of time is spent waiting in a non-blocking way, meaning the limiters' impact on an application event-loop should be close to completely negligible.

Benchmarks

We run benchmarks in CI with Github actions. For a normal ubuntu-latest runner, we see runtimes for both limiters:

When creating 100 instances of each implementation and calling them at the same time, the average runtimes are:

• Semaphore implementation: ~0.6ms per instance
• Token bucket implementation: ~0.03ms per instance

Take a look at the benchmarking script if you want to run your own tests!

Implementation reference

The semaphore implementation

The semaphore implementation is useful when you need to limit a process to n concurrent actions. For example if you have several web servers, and you're interacting with an API that will only tolerate a certain amount of concurrent requests before locking you out.

The flow can be broken down as follows:

The initial lua script first checks if the redis list we will build the semaphore on exists or not. It does this by calling SETNX on the key of the queue plus a postfix (if the name specified in the class instantiation is "my-queue", then the queue name will be __self-limiters:my-queue and setnx will be called for __self-limiters:my-queue-exists). If the returned value is 1 it means the queue we will use for our semaphore does not exist yet and needs to be created.

It might strike you as weird to maintain a separate value, just to indicate whether a list exists, when we could just check the list itself. It would be nice if we could use EXISTS on the list directly, but unfortunately a list is considered not to exist when all elements are popped (i.e., when a semaphore is fully acquired), so I don't see another way of doing this. Contributions are very welcome if you do!

Then if the queue needs to be created we call RPUSH with the number of arguments equal to the capacity value used when initializing the semaphore instance. For a semaphore with a capacity of 5, we call RPUSH 1 1 1 1 1, where the values are completely arbitrary.

Once the list/queue has been created, we BLPOP to block until it's our turn. BLPOP is FIFO by default. We also make sure to specify the max_sleep based on the initialized semaphore instance setting. If nothing was passed we allow sleeping forever.

On __aexit__ we run three commands in a pipelined query. We RPUSH a 1 back into the queue to "release" the semaphore, and set an expiry on the queue and the string value we called SETNX on.

The expires are a half measure for dealing with dropped capacity. If a node holding the semaphore dies, the capacity might never be returned. If, however, there is no one using the semaphore for the duration of the expiry value, all values will be cleared, and the semaphore will be recreated at full capacity next time it's used. The expiry is 30 seconds at the time of writing, but could be made configurable.

The token bucket implementation

The token bucket implementation is useful when you need to limit a process by a time interval. For example, to 1 request per minute, or 50 requests every 10 seconds.

The implementation is forward-looking. It works out the time there would have been capacity in the bucket for a given client and returns that time. From there we can asynchronously sleep until it's time to perform our rate limited action.

The flow can be broken down as follows:

Call the schedule Lua script which first GETs the state of the bucket.

The bucket state contains the last time slot scheduled and the number of tokens left for that time slot. With a capacity of 1, having a tokens_left_for_slot variable makes no sense, but if there's capacity of 2 or more, it is possible that we will need to schedule multiple clients to the same time slot.

The script then works out whether to decrement the tokens_left_for_slot value, or to increment the time slot value wrt. the frequency variable.

Finally, we store the bucket state again using SETEX. This allows us to store the state and set expiry at the same time. The default expiry is 30 at the time of writing, but could be made configurable.

One thing to note, is that this would not work if it wasn't for the fact that redis is single threaded, so Lua scripts on Redis are FIFO. Without this we would need locks and a lot more logic.

Then we just sleep!

Contributing

Please do! Feedback on the implementation, issues, and PRs are all welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for more details.

Please also consider starring the repo to raise visibility.