ExpressBruteFlexible with Sentinel Redis store behaves unexpectedly

[mcandea04]

Hi, having some trouble when migrating my limiters using ExpressBruteFlexible from Mongo to Redis store.
I noticed that now they allow only freeRetries-1 instead of freeRetries, and after free retries are exhausted don't allow any more requests, even after waiting for the minWait (and even maxWait) duration, until the lifetime period passes.
Also I noticed only the entry with prefix free: is created in Redis, and no block: and counter:, like I saw it happening in Mongo (probably this is the root cause of the behaviour).

I am using rate-limiter-flexible v2.4.2, and have same problem with 3.0.0 too.
For the Redis connection I am using ioredis v4.28.5.
I have tried both with and without {enable_offline_queue: false} when building the Redis client, and still no luck.

This is how I build the limiter:

new ExpressBruteFlexible(ExpressBruteFlexible.LIMITER_TYPES.REDIS, {
		storeClient: getSimpleClient({ ...config.redis }),
		freeRetries: 5,
		minWait: 60000,
		maxWait: 300000,
})

and then call .getMiddleware() on it to obtain the middleware to use in the endpoint.

Any clue would be appreciated 🙏 Thanks in advance!

[animir]

@mcandea04 Hi, do you see some error or usual Too many requests in this time frame. ?

[animir]

@mcandea04 ExpressBruteFlexible with Redis works in other projects, so more you provide, easier it would be to help.
Could you test it without Redis Sentinel, but with Redis?

[mcandea04]

@animir I have tested connecting directly to Redis master and not to the sentinel, and indeed the behaviour is as expected in that case😳.
Does that help, or do you still need me to share getSimpleClient and config.redis?
Unfortunately bypassing the sentinel is not an option for our setup.

[animir]

@mcandea04 Unfortunately, I've never used Redis Sentinel, and not sure what it may be. I guess It isn't supported by rate-limiter-flexible. What we could do here is to try to dig dipper, why Sentinel creates one key, but not another. Maybe, it stores keys on different nodes? If so, is there a way to set some parameter to make it work as usual Redis Server?

[mcandea04]

Hello again @animir! So apparently of all the changes that I've tried, the one that actually made the difference was NOT bypassing the Redis sentinel, but upgrading rate-limiter-flexible from 2.4.2 to 3.0.0. My bad there, I must have got confused somehow.
Which makes sense, since I'm using ioredis and the release notes for 3.0.0 do mention improved support for it.
So I think this is solved. Many thanks again for your swift support! 🙌

[animir]

@mcandea04 You're welcome.