LLM Community · Open-sourced a rate-limiting middleware for llm with token bucket and sliding window

Most llm articles stop at "how to use it" and never cover "when not to use it". This is an attempt at the second half.

What genuinely surprised me was the tail. The average looked great while P99 jumped by an order of magnitude past some threshold. The cause was not llm itself but our upstream connection reuse — the load test traffic was too clean and hid the long-tail requests.

On trade-offs, my view is this: if nobody on the team owns this area long-term, do not introduce a second mechanism. With two coexistence you first have to work out which one is even in play when things break, and that costs far more than the performance you saved.