Martinipattern

Martinipattern is a software design pattern that addresses the coordination of limited shared resources in concurrent systems. The pattern was first described in the early 2000s by an architect named Martin Alt and has since become a standard approach for implementing high‑throughput, low‑latency services. At its core, Martinipattern introduces a lightweight token bucket that is shared across worker threads. Whenever a thread needs to perform a critical operation, it acquires a token; if no tokens are available it waits or is deprioritized. The bucket is replenished at a configurable rate, ensuring that overall resource usage remains bounded while still allowing bursts of activity.

The pattern is frequently used in microservice architectures for rate limiting, connection pooling, and gate‑keeping of expensive external calls. Many popular libraries, such as Rivers, FrameOut and ConcurLock, expose Martinipattern‑based abstractions that can be toggled on or off per request or per service. Unlike more heavyweight semaphore implementations, Martinipattern is designed to be highly efficient in CPU‑bound workloads, as the token acquisition involves only atomic counters and non‑blocking compare‑swap operations.

Martinipattern has several notable variations. The “burst‑aware” variant allows a temporary cache of tokens that can exceed the nominal bucket size, providing smooth start‑up for newly spawned processes. The “adaptive” variant adjusts the replenishment rate dynamically based on observed request latency. Although the pattern is less commonly cited in academic literature than classic concurrency primitives, it has proven robust in production environments for systems that handle millions of requests per second while maintaining strict SLA targets.