Spring / Resilience4j Interview questions
When should you use RateLimiter instead of Bulkhead?
Use RateLimiter when the constraint is a rate over time - calls per second or per minute - such as respecting a third-party API's documented rate limit or protecting a downstream system from a traffic burst.
Use Bulkhead instead when the constraint is concurrency at any given instant - how many calls can be in flight simultaneously - such as preventing one slow dependency from consuming every thread in a shared pool.
A useful way to tell them apart: a RateLimiter would still reject the 101st call in a second even if the previous 100 all completed instantly, while a Bulkhead would happily allow 1,000 calls per second as long as no more than, say, 10 are ever running at the exact same moment.
RateLimiter is the right fit when the constraint is:
A Bulkhead would reject a call primarily because:
More Related questions...
