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Design a distributed rate limiter

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AppleGoogleMeta+2System designLast asked Aug 2026

Design a rate limiter that enforces a token-bucket limit per client across a fleet of servers. Cover where the limiter sits, where the bucket state lives (a shared store, local buckets with syncing), keeping the check fast on every request, race conditions between servers, what happens when the shared store is slow or down, and how limits are configured per client or endpoint.

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