Glossary · Reliability & operations
Load Shedding
Deliberately rejecting, dropping, or cancelling selected work at one or more overload boundaries when demand exceeds the capacity available to produce useful results.
Why it matters
Continuing to accept every request during overload can increase queueing until nearly all requests miss their deadlines and recovery becomes harder.
In practice
Shed at the earliest informed boundary, preserve high-priority and already-admitted work when possible, identify the overloaded scope, and mark a response retryable only when the condition is transient and the request remains within its retry budget.
Common confusion
Load shedding is not confined to work that has already been accepted. Admission control is specifically the pre-acceptance gate, while rate limiting can enforce a usage policy even when capacity remains.
Related terms
Sources
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