Overload Control

Load Shedding Protects Useful Work When Capacity Is Exhausted

A service can be healthy at 2,000 requests per second and collapse at 2,400. The extra 400 requests do not merely wait their turn. They may occupy connection slots, queue entries, memory, worker threads, database sessions, and retry budgets while useful throughput falls. Load shedding places an explicit admission decision before a scarce resource is fully consumed. When the system cannot serve all incoming work within its operating envelope, it rejects selected requests early instead of allowing every request to compete until they all become slow.