Throttling method calls to M requests in N seconds

Read up on the Token bucket algorithm. Basically, you have a bucket with tokens in it. Every time you execute the method, you take a token. If there are no more tokens, you block until you get one. Meanwhile, there is some external actor that replenishes the tokens at a fixed interval.

I'm not aware of a library to do this (or anything similar). You could write this logic into your code or use AspectJ to add the behavior.

What worked out of the box for me was Google Guava RateLimiter.

// Allow one request per second
private RateLimiter throttle = RateLimiter.create(1.0);

private void someMethod() {
    throttle.acquire();
    // Do something
}

I'd use a ring buffer of timestamps with a fixed size of M. Each time the method is called, you check the oldest entry, and if it's less than N seconds in the past, you execute and add another entry, otherwise you sleep for the time difference.

In concrete terms, you should be able to implement this with a DelayQueue. Initialize the queue with M Delayed instances with their delay initially set to zero. As requests to the method come in, take a token, which causes the method to block until the throttling requirement has been met. When a token has been taken, add a new token to the queue with a delay of N.