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API Rate Limiting

API rate limiting is the practice of restricting how many requests a client can send to an API within a defined window, such as per second, minute, or day. Platforms use rate limits to protect shared infrastructure, prevent abuse, and keep latency predictable under load. Limits may be enforced with token buckets, leaky buckets, or fixed windows, and are often scoped by API key, workspace, IP address, or endpoint class depending on how the service is designed.

Why it matters for B2B support

For support and engineering teams, rate limits matter because investigation tooling often queries many endpoints in parallel during incidents or account debugging. If those tools ignore quotas, the result is partial data, 429 responses, or secondary failures that make the original customer issue harder to diagnose.

How Altor helps

Altor coordinates investigation requests across 6 production systems so support automation can gather evidence fast without blowing through external or internal API quotas.

FAQ

What does HTTP 429 mean?

It means the client sent more requests than the API allows for the current time window. Good clients back off and retry using the provider's headers.

Are all rate limits request-count based?

No. Some providers limit tokens, concurrent jobs, bandwidth, or weighted endpoint cost instead of raw request count.

Related terms

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