API Resilience Tests: Rate Limiting, DoS, and Multilingual Support
Verify your API returns 429 on high‑frequency requests and handles long inputs and multilingual data without crashing.
Patch your API to return a 429 status on excessive request rates; add explicit rate‑limit handling and monitor for DoS and multilingual input resilience.
Summary
The author performed three resilience tests on a custom API: 1) high‑frequency requests to check for rate limiting – the platform did not return 429 but Cloudflare protected against malicious traffic; 2) an extra‑long input (thousands of repeated characters) – the API returned 200 OK and did not crash; 3) special characters and multilingual input (Korean, emojis) – the API returned 200 OK and handled the content correctly. Two tests passed fully, one half‑passed due to lack of explicit 429 handling. The author plans to test HTTPS/TLS next and will publish a full 10‑test score sheet.
Key changes
- High‑frequency requests did not trigger 429; Cloudflare mitigated malicious traffic
- Extra‑long input of thousands of characters returned 200 OK, no crash
- Special characters and Korean text returned 200 OK, no garbled output
- Two tests passed fully, one half‑passed due to missing explicit rate‑limit response
- Plan to test HTTPS/TLS next