dsh-rate-limiter

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A proactive rate limiter plugin for DeepSeek Harness (dsh): it controls the request rate per provider (token bucket) before model requests are issued, and queues the request with a delay instead of failing when the limit is exceeded — avoiding upstream 429s.

It complements the official dsh-llm-retry (exponential backoff after failure): rate limiting comes first (prevention), backoff comes last (safety net); the two do not interfere with each other.

Features

• Per-provider token bucket, enforced before the request is sent (proactive prevention)
• Over-limit requests are queued with a delay instead of rejected (no 429s, no lost requests)
• Unconfigured providers pass through untouched (zero intrusion)
• Queued waits honor the abort signal: stopping the user interrupts the wait immediately
• Hand-written reservation-based token bucket (concurrency-safe), zero third-party rate-limiting dependencies
• Mounts on agent/request, coexists naturally with dsh-llm-retry

Installation

Install from npm:

dsh plugin --profile web add @xidong-ai/dsh-rate-limiter

npm registry URLs are case-sensitive; use the lowercase package name.

Or install directly from GitHub:

dsh plugin --profile web add github:Xidong-AI/dsh-rate-limiter

For local development, add the checkout directly:

dsh plugin --profile web add .

After installing, dsh --profile web --dump-config should show the plugin entry:

- id: rate-limiter
  name: @xidong-ai/dsh-rate-limiter
  config:
    enabled: true
    providers: {}

Configuration

Configure the token bucket per provider in the profile's cordis.patch.yml (or this plugin's cordis.patch.yml):

- id: rate-limiter
  config:
    enabled: true
    providers:
      nvidia:
        rate: 2          # tokens/second (long-term average QPS)
        burst: 5         # bucket capacity (allowed burst requests)
      oc-zen:
        rate: 1
        burst: 3

• rate: refill rate (tokens/second), i.e. the long-term average request rate.
• burst: bucket capacity, the number of burst requests allowed.
• Providers not listed are not rate-limited; requests pass through untouched (zero intrusion).
• enabled: false disables the plugin entirely.

How It Works

The plugin hooks onto the agent/request waterfall: it await next() first to obtain the call config (which carries the provider), then performs a per-provider token bucket check; when tokens are insufficient, it queues the request with a delay (interrupted immediately by the abort signal when the user stops), then returns the config unchanged — it never modifies request content, never changes routing, never swallows errors. It only controls when a request is issued.

The rate-limiting algorithm is a hand-written reservation-based token bucket (concurrency-safe), with zero third-party rate-limiting dependencies.

Relationship with dsh-llm-retry

Plugin	Timing	Behavior
dsh-rate-limiter	Before the request is issued	Queue with a delay when over the limit (prevents 429s)
dsh-llm-retry	After the request fails	Exponential backoff retry (safety net)

They mount at different points (agent/request vs agent/request-error) and coexist naturally.

Uninstall

dsh plugin --profile web remove @xidong-ai/dsh-rate-limiter

Development

npm install
npm run typecheck   # tsc --noEmit
npm run test        # vitest run
npm run build       # esbuild transpiles lib/*.ts → lib/*.js

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Linux.do community for support.