Convert Hourly Rate Limits to Per Second Rates

Hourly to Per-Second Conversion

APIs like GitHub (5,000/hour) and many enterprise APIs express limits per hour. Converting to per-second helps you design retry logic, queue processors, and worker pools.

Basic Formula

Requests per second = Hourly limit / 3,600

Example: 5,000 Requests/Hour (GitHub)

Unit	Value
Per hour	5,000
Per minute	83.33
Per second	1.39
Per day	120,000

The Burst Problem

The raw conversion tells you the sustained average rate. However, most hourly-windowed rate limiters actually allow you to send all 5,000 requests in the first few seconds if you want. The limit only prevents you from exceeding 5,000 within any given 60-minute window.

This creates two distinct rates:

1. Burst rate: The maximum instantaneous rate the server accepts (often limited by a separate concurrency limit or connection pool)
2. Sustained rate: The long-term average you cannot exceed (5,000/hr = 1.39/s)

Queue Design Implications

For a job queue consuming the GitHub API, you should:

• Set your worker concurrency based on the burst rate for short-lived tasks
• Set your dispatch rate based on the sustained rate for long-running processes
• Implement exponential backoff when receiving 429 responses
• Monitor X-RateLimit-Remaining to adapt dispatch rate dynamically