Auto-Cache Clean / Garbage Collection

[stealthco-tony]

Expected Behaviour

Expect the service to automatically clean the cache once the rate_limit has expired (for the given Key). For example, if the key_func is IP Address, and we set a limit of 1 time per hour, once Flask limiter determines the hour has passed, it should clear the cache. There is no point/need in keeping old requests that are outside the limiting time period once the period has passed (if anything, they should be logged in a more persistent storage, not memorystorage).

For v1 of this new feature, I would expect it to check on every call of the decorated route(s). For v2, you could spin off a separate microservice that is constantly monitoring and clearing caches (even a paid upgrade).

Thanks!

[Shellcat-Zero]

I was about to ask about this because I couldn't find an answer in the documentation. Does the memory keep filling up then, the longer that the flask app is running? I would expect periodic garbage collection, at the very least, probably when receiving another event that checks the limiter, and then at that time the limiter deletes expired entries. If doing it on every event might be too expensive, then there probably needs to be some configurable parameter to clean the cache every N events, or something similar.