Backend & systems·Resilience and failure handling
you start rejecting requests immediately with a 503 instead of accepting work you have no chance of finishing in time.
Load shedding
Also calledadmission control, brownout
Deliberately dropping a fraction of incoming work when the system is beyond capacity, so the remainder is served correctly. Accepting everything and timing out is worse for everyone: the client already gave up, and you spent the capacity anyway. Shed the cheapest-to-reject and least valuable traffic first, which requires knowing which traffic that is before the incident.