"Remote" Faraday: Respecting API Rate Limits

Posted on 06 Oct 2014 by Eric Oestrich

This post will continue with the last post about Running an extra process inside of sidekiq.

My side project connects to a lot of APIs (themoviedb.org, thetvdb.com, GoodReads, and BoardGameGeek). Each of one of these has their own rate limit. Previously I was scheduling sidekiq jobs 10 seconds apart to make sure I didn’t hit any of their limits. This was really lame and I wanted a nicer way of handling the rate limit.

What I came up with was what I referred to as “remote” faraday. The faraday connection is in a single spot inside of the extra process I stuck inside of sidekiq.

I have classes that handle each API for two specific needs, searching for items and viewing a single item. A sample for BoardGameGeek is below.

class BGG
  def search(board_game_name)
    response = remote_faraday.
      get(:bgg, "/xmlapi/search?search=#{CGI.escape(board_game_name)}")
    xml = Nokogiri::XML(response)
    # process the xml
  end

  def board_game(board_game_id)
    request = remote_faraday.
      get(:bgg, "/xmlapi/boardgame/#{board_game_id}")
    xml = Nokogiri::XML(request)
    # process the xml
  end

  private

  def remote_faraday
    @remote_faraday ||= RemoteFaraday.new
  end
end

There’s not much difference here from a regular faraday connection and my “remote” connection. This was nice because this class shouldn’t care about the change.

Here is what the RemoteFaraday class looks like:

class RemoteFaraday
  MAX_LOOPS = 200 # a minute or so of waiting

  class TimeoutError < StandardError
  end

  def initialize(container = AppContainer)
    @redis_pool = container.redis_connection_pool
    @uuid_generator = container.uuid_generator
  end

  def get(client, path)
    uuid = @uuid_generator.uuid

    @redis_pool.with do |redis|
      redis.lpush("remote-faraday:requests", {
        :method => :get,
        :client => client,
        :path => path,
        :uuid => uuid,
      }.to_json)
    end

    count = 0
    begin
      response = @redis_pool.with do |redis|
        redis.get(redis_key(client, :get, path, uuid))
      end
      sleep 0.3
      count += 1
    end while response.nil? && count < MAX_LOOPS

    if response.nil?
      raise TimeoutError
    end

    @redis_pool.with do |redis|
      redis.del(redis_key(client, :get, path, uuid))
    end

    response
  end

  private

  def redis_key(client, method, path, uuid)
    "#{client}:response:#{method}:#{path}:#{uuid}"
  end
end

The class takes a redis pool and UUID generator from an application container. The UUID is used to make sure each request is saved uniquely inside of redis. We don’t want to overwrite a different request/response.

The RemoteFaraday class pushes a request into the redis queue and waits about a minute for a response. In order to not fill up redis we clear out the key that the response was saved into.

This class only handles GETs at the moment because I haven’t needed to use any other method yet.

The other end of the queue is the RemoteOrchestrator that was seen in the previous post. Here is the full one.

class RemoteOrchestrator
  include Celluloid
  include Celluloid::Logger

  def initialize(redis_pool = AppContainer.redis_connection_pool)
    @redis_pool = redis_pool

    info "Starting orchestrator for remote connections"

    after(1) do
      loop!
    end
  end

  def loop!
    message = @redis_pool.with do |redis|
      redis.brpop("remote-faraday:requests", :timeout => 5)
    end

    unless message
      async.loop!
      return
    end

    message = JSON.parse(message.last)

    info "Received: #{message.inspect}"

    worker = workers[message["client"]]
    worker.async.send(message["method"], message["path"], message["uuid"])

    async.loop!
  end

  private

  def workers
    @workers ||= {
      "bgg" => Celluloid::Actor[:bgg],
    }
  end

  def connection_pool
    @redis_pool
  end
end

This is virtually the same as what I put in the last post. The #loop! method calls itself after each message or breaking from a timeouted brpop.

Below is the RemoteConnection class that uses faraday to connect to an API.

class RemoteConnection
  include Celluloid
  include Celluloid::Logger

  def initialize(connection_pool = AppContainer.redis_connection_pool)
    @connection_pool = connection_pool
  end

  def get(path, uuid)
    exclusive do
      info "Fetching #{path} with uuid #{uuid}"
      response = connection.get(path)

      @connection_pool.with do |redis|
        redis.set(redis_key(:get, path, uuid), response.body)
        info "Set response to #{redis_key(:get, path, uuid)}"
      end

      sleep timeout
    end
  end

  def timeout
    1
  end

  private

  def redis_key(method, path, uuid)
    "#{client}:response:#{method}:#{path}:#{uuid}"
  end

  def connection
    @connection ||= Faraday.new(host)
  end
end

The important bit in the previous class is exclusive. This is a celluloid directive that makes sure only 1 worker ever runs what is inside of the block. Since the entire method is inside the block only 1 connection will happen.

Below is a specific subclass for BoardGameGeek.

class RemoteBGG < RemoteConnection
  def host
    "http://boardgamegeek.com"
  end

  def client
    :bgg
  end
end

This was a fun little project that has let me speed up my sidekiq jobs since I no longer needed to arbitrarily wait 10 seconds in between jobs. I’ve thought about making this into a gem, but I haven’t had a reason to yet. I’m also not sure how useful it would be as a gem.

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