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load shedding
Refuse the cheap requests so the expensive, important ones still finish. A polite 503 beats a timeout for everyone.
What is load shedding?
Load shedding drops or rejects work when the system is past a limit. Priority matters: health checks and paid checkout stay; search suggestions go. It is a choice you make in code, not something the kernel does kindly.
Why does load shedding matter when vibe coding?
Models let every route compete until the database saturates and all of them fail. Name what you are willing to refuse first.
How do you do load shedding?
A concurrency or latency budget. Over budget, shed a named class of traffic with 503 and Retry-After. Do not shed the request that is mid-payment.
How do you ask a model for load shedding?
When (service) is over budget, shed (low-priority routes) with 503. Keep (checkout or writes) running. Do not let every endpoint time out together.
What goes wrong with load shedding?
Shedding at random, including the health check. The balancer then kills the instance that was trying to survive.