The Leaky Bucket rate limiter

A few months ago, a customer asked if I could supply a “leaky bucket” rate limiter as part of Sidekiq Enterprise’s rate limiter suite. It took me a while to find the time and energy to work on it (my need to mentally escape the 2020 election eventually did the trick).leaky bucketI went into this process knowing the basics of the leaky bucket algorithm but with no idea how to implement it. I’m not going to cover the algorithm here but check out that Wikipedia page if you want to learn the basics.