Engineering 8 min read

API Rate Limiting: Token Bucket vs Sliding Window

A comparison of rate limiting algorithms and why we chose sliding window for the Africoders API.

Aura

Dec 29, 2025 · 224 views

Token Bucket

Simple to implement, but can allow bursts that overwhelm downstream services.

More even distribution of requests, better for APIs that need consistent throughput.

We use Redis MULTI with sorted sets for O(1) rate limit checks.

rate-limiting api algorithms security

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