These days, Wandering Thoughts has some hacked together HTTP request rate limits. They don't exist for strong technical reasons; my blog engine setup here can generally stand up to even fairly extreme traffic floods (through an extensive series of hacks). It's definitely possible to overwhelm Wandering Thoughts with a high enough request volume, and HTTP rate limits will certainly help with that, but that's not really why they exist. My HTTP rate limits exist for ultimately social reasons and because they let me stop worrying and stop caring about certain sorts of abuse.

As we all know by now here in 2026, abuse definitely happens , even if it isn't killing your web servers. There are things out there who think nothing of making thousands or tens of thousands of requests to your web server a day. Some of them are people running crawlers and other undesired things, and some of them are syndication feed fetchers with very fast polling intervals (which is why the first ratelimits I implemented where syndication feed rate limits ). Usually the level of excess requests is moderate. Large abuse doesn't happen very often on typical sites like mine, but it does happen every so often.

The advantage of having HTTP request rate limiting, even in the fallible form I have on Wandering Thoughts , is that I don't have to worry or really care about it. I'll never wake up in the morning to discover that something has made tens of thousands of requests overnight, because these days all but the first few of those requests will have been choked off. I also don't have to be annoyed by badly behaved syndication feed readers and consider various things to maybe get them to behave better, because all that sort of excessive, antisocial behavior gets blocked now .

(I have had the experience of discovering thousands of requests from a single source in the past and not particularly enjoyed it, even if nothing noticed in terms of load and response time and so on.)

For me, HTTP ratelimits have become something that give me peace of mind. I don't expect them to trigger very often (and generally they don't), but despite their infrequent activation I find them valuable and reassuring. They're a precaution against something that I hope is infrequent or, ideally, nonexistent.

(The corollary of this is that I don't regret the programming effort to add them to DWiki , the engine behind Wandering Thoughts , or even how moderately messy and hacked in the change is. For some changes you do care how often they get used and feel annoyed if they aren't used as often as you expected, but for me ratelimits aren't one of those.)