LuTiao Programming

Sep 21, 2026 · Backend Development

Distributed Rate Limiting with Redis + Lua: Surviving API Floods in Spring Boot

After an external system hammered a Spring Boot search endpoint causing database connection exhaustion, the author builds a distributed fixed-window rate limiter using Redis and Lua for atomicity, wraps it with an annotation-driven AOP aspect supporting user, IP, API key, and global dimensions, returns proper HTTP 429 with Retry-After, discusses fixed-window limitations versus token bucket and sliding window, and covers fail-open/fail-closed strategies for Redis outages plus monitoring metrics.