[10.x] Custom RateLimiter increase

[khepin]

Context

Sometimes a rate limit doesn't map directly to an increase of 1 at a time. Some examples would be:

• a limit on bandwidth used
• a limit on # of updates across batch calls where each call could mean multiple "hits"
• a limit on time spent on some operations

For such rate limits today, the only available options via the RateLimiter class would be to loop and call ->hit for as many times as we want to increment.
This becomes impractical when the number we want to increment by increases since each hit requires updating a cache server.

Where do we use this?

At Square, we use a mechanism in queued jobs where we give higher / lower priority to certain users depending how much compute they've used across multiple jobs.
That is decided by counting the time spent across all queue workers up to a given limit over time. So rate limiting based not on each 1 job counting for 1 but instead counting for how many milliseconds were spent on the job.

So for a job running in 250ms, it would be easier to increment the number of attempts by 250 directly.

Proposal

Introduce additional increment public method on the RateLimiter class to enable incrementing by a custom amount.

[bert-w]

Is adding an optional third parameter $step = 1 to hit() a breaking change? if not, i think that is preferred because increment() now just is an alias.

[ahinkle]

I see the need here, but is method names like hit() and increment() ambiguous for developers?

[khepin]

Do you have a suggestion you think is clearer?
I'm struggling to come up with something else

[Anton5360]

Do you have a suggestion you think is clearer? I'm struggling to come up with something else

I would suggest hitTimes naming.

This way we don`t have two ambiguous method names but just kind of "expand" the existing one

[christophrumpel]

Hey, trying to understand how the new hit/increment method works. Let's say I have a limiter:

RateLimiter::for('api', function (Request $request) {
        return Limit::perMinute(5)->by($request->user()?->id ?: $request->ip());
});

What would be the key for the increment method now?

Or do you know if this only works when used like this?

if (RateLimiter::tooManyAttempts('send-message:'.$user->id, $perMinute = 5)) {
    return 'Too many attempts!';
}
 
RateLimiter::hit('send-message:'.$user->id);

[khepin]

I have only ever used it in the second way you show here so I would say that right now it only works when used that way yes.

[christophrumpel]

Ok, thanks, I thought so, too, since this was the only way I made it work. Still great work 👍