About rate limiting

  Last updated 2024-03-28

Rate limiting is a way to control the rate at which traffic flows through Fastly's network to your origins. You might need rate limiting if you need to do things like prevent abusive bots, mitigate DDoS attacks, measure types of activity so you can meter them, and create queueing solutions like waiting rooms to prevent traffic surges.

NOTE

This page discusses basic information about using the main dashboard for our Edge Rate Limiting product. Edge Rate Limiting is designed for use cases where a faster response to large volumes of traffic is required (e.g., mitigating DDoS attacks). For details about Advanced Rate Limiting and its use in the Fastly Next-Gen WAF, refer to the advanced rate limiting rules documentation.

About the Edge rate limiting page

The Edge rate limiting page displays a summary of all rate limiting policies currently in effect across your services. Each summary includes the following details:

  • Service: the name of the service
  • Policy name: the name of the rate limiting policy
  • Requests per second: the maximum number of requests per second within the detection window counted before enacting the rate limiting policy
  • Detection window: the duration of the rate limiting window
  • Action: the action taken once the rate limit is exceeded, either Block or Log only

Security products note

No security product, such as a WAF or DDoS mitigation product, including those security services offered by Fastly, will detect or prevent all possible attacks or threats. As a subscriber, you should maintain appropriate security controls on all web applications and origins. The use of Fastly's security products do not relieve you of this obligation. As a subscriber, you should test and validate the effectiveness of Fastly's security services to the extent possible prior to deploying these services in production, continuously monitor their performance, and adjust these services as appropriate to address changes in your web applications, origin services, and configurations of the other aspects of your Fastly services.
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