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Rate Limiter for Burst Traffic
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Rate Limiter for Burst Traffic

MediumPython

Problem

Quantcast APIs can receive short traffic bursts that should be tolerated without allowing sustained overload. Implement a per-client token bucket rate limiter for a chronologically ordered request stream.

Each client has a bucket with a maximum capacity of capacity tokens. Initially, every client's bucket is full. Tokens are replenished continuously at refill_rate tokens per second, but the bucket cannot exceed its capacity. Processing one request consumes one token. A request is allowed only when its client's bucket contains at least one token after replenishment.

Formal Specification

Implement rate_limit(requests, capacity, refill_rate), where requests is a list of [timestamp, client_id] pairs. timestamp is a nonnegative number of seconds, and client_id is a string. Return a list of booleans in request order, where True means allowed and False means rejected. Requests are globally ordered by nondecreasing timestamp. Each client's state must be independent.

Constraints

  • 1 <= len(requests) <= 10^5
  • 1 <= capacity <= 10^6
  • 0 < refill_rate <= 10^6
  • Timestamps are nondecreasing and have at most six decimal places
  • Each request contains exactly one timestamp and one client ID

Function Signature

def rate_limit(requests, capacity, refill_rate):
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