Why Frontend Rate Limiting is Essential

Imagine your React app calling the API on every keystroke in the search bar. It’s fast, but inefficient, leading to unnecessary server load and slower response times. Solution? Throttle your API requests. This ensures users get a smooth experience, and you don’t bombard the server with repeated calls. This 4-minute guide will show you how to throttle API calls in React to improve your app’s performance.

What is Throttling in Frontend?

Throttling ensures that an action (like an API request) is executed only after a certain amount of time has passed since the last call, regardless of how many times the user triggers it. For example, if you're implementing a search bar in React, you don’t want to send an API request on every single keystroke. Instead, you can throttle the requests to send only after the user stops typing for 500 milliseconds.

Quick and Easy Throttling in React with Lodash

In React, Lodash offers an excellent function for throttling API requests called _.throttle. Here's how you can implement it in just a few steps

Step 1: Install Lodash

First, install Lodash in your project

1npm install lodash

Step 2: Implement Throttling in Your React Component

Here is a simple example where we throttle the search bar input

1import React, { useState } from "react";
2import { throttle } from "lodash";
3
4const SearchComponent = () => {
5  const [query, setQuery] = useState("");
6
7  const handleSearch = throttle(async (e) => {
8    const response = await fetch(`/api/search?q=${e.target.value}`);
9    const data = await response.json();
10    console.log(data); 
11  }, 500); // Limit to 1 request every 500ms
12
13  return (
14    <div>
15      <input
16        type="text"
17        value={query}
18        onChange={(e) => {
19          setQuery(e.target.value);
20          handleSearch(e); // Throttled function
21        }}
22        placeholder="Search..."
23      />
24    </div>
25  );
26};
27
28export default SearchComponent;
29

When to Use Throttling in Frontend

1. Search inputs
2. Scroll events
3. Resize events
4. Button clicks in rapid succession

It reduces the strain on your server, improves the user experience, and enhances performance.

Conclusion

Implementing throttling in React is a quick and easy win for your app’s performance. Whether it’s preventing excessive API requests or reducing the load on the server, throttling will ensure your app runs smoothly.