API concurrency
The ability of an API to handle multiple requests at the same time is referred to as API concurrency. It is particularly important in a decentralized system, where lots of independent services communicate with one another through APIs. If the system is overloaded without proper concurrent control, it can lead to race conditions where several processes access and manipulate the same data, leading to inconsistent results.
The following are the ways supported to handle concurrency:
- Multi-threading: This is perhaps the most common way to handle concurrency. Each request is handled by a specific thread so that multiple requests can be processed in parallel. The downside is that it may be resource-intensive to manage many threads.
- Rate limiting: This is used to control the number of API requests that a client may make during a specified time. This ensures that your API is not overwhelmed with too many requests at once.
- Queuing: If the number of concurrent...