Reliability & operations · Glossary term
What is 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 does Load Shedding matter?
Continuing to accept every request during overload can increase queueing until nearly all requests miss their deadlines and recovery becomes harder.
Load Shedding 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.
What is the common confusion about Load Shedding?
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.
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Related terms
- Admission ControlA pre-acceptance gate that decides whether a request may enter a bounded queue or service under the system's current capacity, priority,…
- BackpressureA flow-control mechanism that slows or rejects upstream work when a downstream component cannot process it safely at the current rate.
- Rate LimitA policy that caps requests, tokens, concurrent work, or another resource within a defined time or capacity window.
- Graceful DegradationPreserving a bounded core service when capacity or dependencies are impaired by reducing optional quality, features, freshness, or…
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