Glossary · Reliability & operations
Saturation
The degree to which a constrained resource or service has exhausted its capacity, including queued work that cannot begin promptly.
Why it matters
Utilization alone can appear acceptable while memory, accelerator slots, queue depth, or a downstream quota is already limiting useful throughput.
In practice
Identify each critical resource, measure active and waiting work, relate saturation to tail latency and errors, and alert before the queue enters an unstable growth regime.
Common confusion
Saturation is not one universal percentage. The limiting resource and its queueing behavior depend on the workload and architecture.
Related terms
Sources
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